The Prevention Symbol was designed as a vehicle to educate and motivate young people to participate in creating a world where we recognize the implications of our actions and each take personal responsibility for the stewardship of life on earth.
The Prevention Symbol functions as a proactive visual tool to help enable discovery, encourage discussion, trigger thought, convey self-commitment, and define a course of action.
All that with simply a circle, a dot, and a line. The three basic elements of design.
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Originally developed as an antidote to help overcome the spread of HIV/AIDS, The Prevention Symbol was quickly adopted by peer educators who also found it useful to help communicate about other important topics such as drinking, drugs, violence and our relationship with the environment.
Think about it, with all the things going on in our world, prevention is one of the most powerful tools we have to head off the many risks and perils we all face. Yet there was never a singular symbol created to communicate the notion of prevention.
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The power of The Prevention Symbol lies in its ability for peer-to-peer communication to help create a familiar framework for interaction, as an agent of memory, and as a metaphor.
The Prevention Symbol has been drawn by thousands of teens, planted in flowers, made into jewelry, printed on shirts, integrated into school plays, developed into educational curriculum, and won grand prize for a video in KCET TV's "Teens Making a Difference" competition.
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Think globally, act locally. That's how The Prevention Symbol was first approached. Developed in Southern California and implemented by Red Cross peer-educators and students at various schools and concerts such as Lalapalooza we have seen it in action. It works.
Now it's time to act globally! With the new tools the internet provides, and the viral nature of this new social collaborative sphere we live in... it is time to launch phase two of The Prevention Symbol.
