.png)
The SAFE Bar Network works to create a community of bars, restaurants, and nightclubs across the country dedicated to giving everyone a safe night out.
We partner with alcohol-serving venues and teach their teams how to have ongoing conversations about noticing concerning behavior, interrupting effectively, and offering support. Through these conversations, employees shift the workplace culture to focus on taking action to increase safety and prevent violence.
How do we do it? We start by building trust. When we ask people to take a hard look at the issues they are seeing in their venue and to explore solutions we are asking them to be open – that takes trust.
We believe that the staff at the venues we partner with are the experts on how to improve safety. They are already recognizing issues and the SAFE Bar Network’s role is to help them explore solutions to those issues and keep the conversation about bystander intervention going.
We are asking our bar partners to take responsibility for the times they have seen someone who is uncomfortable or unsafe in the past so that they can prevent it in the future. To help them with this, we model accountability so that everyone can be part of the conversation and invested in the change.
Continuing to use active bystander skills is so much more about what happens in the aftermath. So, we help teams build connections with and between people to be sure that people feel supported when they interrupt concerning behavior and offer help.
Beyond the individual training sessions, we offer our partner bars and alcohol-serving venues support so that they can continue building a workplace culture focused on using active bystander skills to give everyone a safe night out.
Not only are these conversations powerful, but they are also fun and effective.
The SAFE Bar Network is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) you can join the team by donating your time, talent, and money to the mission of giving everyone a SAFE Night Out, just click here.
To learn more about joining the SAFE Bar Network contact us at safebarnetwork@gmail.com
There are everyday active bystanders practicing the skills to keep people safe every day. Watch their stories here, Everyday Active Bystanders.
To learn more about active bystander skills check out our blog post, Obstacles. What obstacles? 3 Full Proof Everyday Active Bystander Skills.
Interested in learning more about bystander intervention? Visit our friends at With Us Center for Bystander Intervention.
If you or someone you know has experienced sexual harassment our partners can help. Visit MOCSA.org and RAINN.org
To learn more about the field of violence response and prevention visit PreventConnect.org and NSVRC.org