Gigi Scoles and Anupama Selvam 11 To achieve this goal, the Justice Institute is built on five pillars: (1) deep consultation with local partners to ensure cultural sensitivity and relevance, (2) diversity of perspectives and teaching methods to reach a variety of learners, (3) flexibility in design and implementation to respond to new issues as they arise, (4) utilizing and building networks of individuals and institutions working to address gender-based violence, and (5) experienced and credible trainers. These pillars ensure that responses to gender-based violence are thorough, effective, empowering, sensitive to each specific context, creating an environment that engages and welcomes different stakeholders and learners, ensuring that the methods of addressing gender-based violence fit the community and will be credible. Deep consultation with partners. Gender-based violence is best addressed at a community level, where the necessary contextual analysis can be undertaken. To best design Justice Institutes that suit their target communities, Vital Voices first listens to partners in those communities. Social service organizations, prosecutors, judges, law enforcement officers and other stakeholders who are working to combat gender-based violence locally have the best knowledge of what gaps exist. These partners shape the Justice Institute curriculum to address these gaps so that the training is pertinent to their particular context. Vital Voices follows the lead of these local partners, under­ standing that those on the ground are the experts on their communities. Diversity of perspectives and teaching methods. No single group can conquer gender-based violence alone. Social service providers, law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges all must work together to effectively protect victims and prosecute perpetrators. Most criminal justice systems; however, do not create dialogue amongst these different groups. These groups often work with victims of gender-based violence at different stages37 of the legal process and may be focused on different goals, leading them to operating in silos. With each group often working to support vic­ tims from separate and narrow perspectives, they often fail to understand the overall needs of victims, or the ways in which groups can help support each other’s efforts. For example, a social worker may be focused on avoiding re-traumatization by shielding a victim from the need to talk about the abuse, while a prosecutor may need a victim to talk about the violence endured in order to successfully punish the perpetrator. Though each of these people are seeking justice for the vic­ tim, their immediate goals may not be completely aligned. This creates a need for a multi-disciplinary approach to gender-based violence, a goal that can only be achieved when individuals from different parts of the criminal justice system are in con­ sistent and open dialogue. The Justice Institute Model provides a forum for this communication by bringing different stakeholders into the same room, often for the first time. The Justice Institute Model utilizes group discussions to ensure that participants can express their own goals in sup­ porting survivors of gender-based violence while also putting them in role play activities where they are able to experience and empathize with the goals of other institute participants. Along with a deep respect for diversity of opinion, the Justice Institute employs diverse teach­ ing methods to reach a wider audience of adult learners. By integrating lectures, role plays, slide shows, media, and other teaching methods, Justice Institute trainers reach participants regardless of their preferred learning styles. The diversity of teaching methods makes for a highly engaging and interactive curricula based on Kolb’s theory of experiential learning.38 This means that trainers 37 Victims interact with legal systems in various ways, coming across law enforcement, social workers, prosecutors, judges, and other stakeholders who may be Justice Institute Model participants at different times and in different parts of the legal system. 38 See Kolb, supra note 33.