Every community is unique. In order to achieve "a solution rooted in the community's culture," and to build a trusting relationship, we need to work closely with that community. How do we make contact? Where do we start? Our general strategy is to go into the communities and say: "this is what we do," identify the community leaders and work with them to help them to define their priorities for their community, build trust and relationships, work on their priority issues, and then get their agreement and commitment to work with us on our issues.

We first work to get a feeling for what is important to community members. This means we read, we talk to elders and to people who are deeply rooted in their communities. We are observant and we learn who the community leaders and activists are who make things happen.

For example, when we began organizing in the Samoan community in we found that parenting was of great concern to them. They were at the time not so interested in our work educating re: domestic violence as a priority. A main community concern was violence and the inability of the parents to communicate with their children. So, when we met with them to brainstorm creative ways to educate their community about domestic violence, we found that we could easily incorporate this education on domestic violence into the parenting classes.