Become A Hero
How Do We Become a Heroes Organization?
Heroes organizations are authentic in their commitment to a healthy organizational culture that expects, accepts, and supports intervention. Organizations express this commitment in 8 ways (click on the items below for more information):
Meaningful Staff and Officer Wellness Program
Part of the Heroes program is to connect your employees to the important role health and wellness plays within a culture of active bystandership. Organizations must offer meaningful health and wellness resources to their staff, and our goal is to make it more likely that your people will use the resources available to them.
Dedicated Coordination of Heroes Implementation
To be most effective, Heroes requires a dedicated coordinator to ensure the program is implemented well and to maintain visibility on the practice of bystandership throughout the organization.
Meaningful Training
Heroes provides the meaningful training. Your instructors will complete a robust train-the-trainer program to become a certified Heroes trainer ready to effectively deliver the content as designed with the best possible learning outcomes across all classes taught. If you are a smaller organization, we can do the training for you.
Measuring Efficacy
Heroes provides a pre- and post-implementation survey to measure perceptions, which is an early indicator of change. We’re happy to customize the survey based on specific needs of your organization.
Program Awareness Throughout The Organization
When you become a Heroes organization, the first thing you receive is a communications kit to help ensure you have consistent and accurate information throughout the organization prior to the training.
Accountability
Accountability shows up in many ways – – from leadership expressing their support for active bystandership and attending training, to the organization creating a culture that expects and accepts acts of active bystandership. The Heroes program is designed to help you put these accountability measures into practice.
Policies That Protect Those Who Intervene
A culture that supports the practice of active bystandership must formally protect those who intervene. Heroes provides model policies in the online sustainability kit that every Heroes organization receives.
Follow Through
As with any skill, if active bystandership is not practiced, it’s less likely to be used when it’s needed. The Heroes training contains multiple practice opportunities, but we recommend that Heroes organizations incorporate active bystandership into other training classes, as appropriate, to continue to hone the skill. In addition, Heroes organizations receive an annual, two-hour refresher module to deliver as in-service training.
Our Heroes
Implementation Process
To change an organizational culture, you need knowledge, skills and an environment that expects and supports intervention. We approach this holistically through three phases: organizational readiness, quality implementation & sustainability.
To get off to a strong start, the engagement and commitment of all levels of leadership are required prior to training the skills of active bystandership. Without the support of leadership, receptiveness to the training can be variable and employees may lack confidence that their new behaviors will be supported or accepted.
The Heroes program helps you prepare your organization for maximum impact of training. We provide a comprehensive, customizable communication kit to help you ensure your leadership, the organization, and key stakeholders are aware, engaged and committed at the outset of the Heroes implementation.
Heroes 8-hour active bystandership training is at the heart of the Heroes program. This is where your organization will develop the actionable skills of active bystandership specific to your industry and occupational culture needs.
About the Training:
The training program engages the participants with a highly interactive approach. By participating in discussions, reflections, video analysis, and role-plays, participants not only build the concrete skills needed to be effective interveners, they also understand the social science behind bystandership, which helps them to recognize the need for intervention, and how the practice of intervention directly impacts the health and wellness of everyone.
Quality implementation requires:
Dedicated program coordinator—
Selecting instructors-
Selecting your instructors is one of the most important ways you can ensure the program’s success, and the best instructors for Heroes may not have training experience. We will provide you with instructor criteria and work with you to select the best people in your organization to deliver this training.
Train-the-Trainer Process-
Our robust train-the-trainer program is a 3-day in-person or virtual training that includes experiencing the Heroes class as a student, learning how to deliver the training, and participating in small group teachbacks with guidance and feedback from a National Heroes Instructor.
Quality Delivery and Fidelity to the Program—
Our process includes periodic observations of your Heroes instructors. This can happen virtually or in-person, and the purpose is to provide ongoing feedback to continue the instructor development process and to ensure the program is being delivered as designed.
Heroes is more than training. While training is at the heart of the program, the work of culture change begins from the moment leadership commits to active bystandership with Heroes. It also extends well beyond the training itself. We provide all Heroes organizations with access to an online sustainability kit, which includes model policies, visuals, ongoing internal and external communications, and leadership support resources.
Heroes also supports sustained culture shifts with virtual learning opportunities, virtual or in-person coaching sessions, peer learning sessions with like-organizations, and an annual two-hour refresher course.
Interested in Heroes for your team, department, or state?
If you are interested in active bystandership training for a police or sheriff's department, or want to learn more about the ABLE Project
Active Bystandership For Fire & RescueCorrectionsHealth Care
When you see something, say something. Seems simple, right? At Heroes we know it is not simple. Our commitment is to help organizations pivot from good intentions to cultures that demand and demonstrate active bystandership in the face of potential harm.
Courage, Loyalty & Integrity.
To prevent or stop harm, to engage leaders to transform organizational culture, to save careers and save lives, elevating all.
In 2015, a small group of dedicated civil rights thought leaders made a novel recommendation to the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing: “Integrate ethical decision-making and tactics of intervention in every police training course, both academy and in-service, and include tactical scenarios—similar in format to shoot/don’t shoot types of training—and role-playing with peer intervention in all subjects.” Among the group making this recommendation were HEROES co-founder, Dr. Joel A. Dvoskin, legendary New Orleans civil rights attorney Ms. Mary E. Howell, and New Orleans civil rights activist, Mr. Ted Quant, then of Loyola University New Orleans. The recommendation, founded upon the ground-breaking work of psychologist Ervin Staub , was not formally adopted by the Task Force, but the realization that one could and should teach the tactics of peer intervention to police officers set into motion a series of events the result of which no one could have predicted at the time.
A few years before the 21st Century Task Force heard from Dr. Dvoskin, Ms. Howell, and Mr. Quant, the New Orleans Police Department found itself the subject of a far-reaching federal “patterns and practices” investigation focusing on a host of troubling constitutional violations. The investigation led to a federal Consent Decree in 2012 and the appointment of a Federal Monitor (Mr. Jonathan Aronie) in 2013. The confluence of the NOPD Consent Decree and the 2015 Task Force recommendation would serve as the catalyst that ultimately led to the creation of HEROES.
In late 2015, a small group of NOPD police officers, NOPD police leaders (including Chief John Thomas, Chief Arlinda Westbrook, Captain Nick Gernon, and others), and New Orleans community members (including Ms. Howell and Mr. Quant) approached Mr. Aronie with the idea of launching a “peer intervention” training program in New Orleans. The group found quick support from Mr. Aronie and then-NOPD-Superintendent Michael Harrison, and formed a working group to create the nation’s first department-wide active bystandership training program. The working group consisted of Ms. Howell, Dr. Dvoskin, Mr. Aronie, Dr. Staub, Mike Quinn, NOPD Chief of Staff Danny Cazanev, Chief Thomas, Chief Westbrook, Captain Gernon, Officer Terry Bean, and Officer Jacob Lundy.
The mission of the group was to develop a curriculum that would train officers to intervene in another officer’s conduct — regardless of rank — in order to prevent harm. The program was dubbed EPIC for Ethical Policing is Courageous. Within about a year, the entire NOPD force had been trained in EPIC, and Mr. Aronie, in his role as Monitor, began to hear (and see) instances of officers using their newly-acquired skills to prevent harm.
Building upon its initial success, in 2017, the NOPD in conjunction with the EPIC working group launched a national conference to share the wisdom and science of active bystandership with the policing profession. The EPIC Leadership Conference drew attendees from across the U.S. Feedback was uniformly positive, but few agencies implemented the program in a meaningful way beyond New Orleans. That would change in three years.
Following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, the NOPD and Mr. Aronie received more than 100 calls from law enforcement agencies across the U.S. asking for the EPIC program. The EPIC Working Group quickly recognized they would not be able to meet this demand. They also recognized that a new approach was needed to prevent dilution of the content of EPIC as interest grew. Enter global law firm Sheppard Mullin and Georgetown University Law Center (GULC).
To meet the growing demand for meaningful active bystandership training and ensure integrity of the curriculum, Mr. Aronie’s law firm, Sheppard Mullin, partnered with Karen Rice (Heroes Co-Founder) and GULC to create the country’s first national active bystandership program for law enforcement. The resulting partnership, called ABLE for Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement, established a non-profit program at Georgetown Law Center with the goal of providing meaningful and practical active bystandership training to law enforcement agencies large and small at little or no cost. With initial funding from Sheppard Mullin and the American Arbitration Association, ABLE soon attracted the generosity of other like-minded national organizations, including Mastercard, PepsiCo, and Verizon. By mid-2022, ABLE had more than 275 member agencies, had trained more than 1500 instructors, and had added to its list of partners a host of national brand financial sponsors, including Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Google, Meta, Grainger, Johnson & Johnson, and HNI.
Predictably, as word spread of ABLE’s popularity, other parts of the justice system — corrections, EMS, fire, DAs — began to see the potential value of active bystandership to prevent harm and enhance the wellness of their employees. Since ABLE focuses exclusively on police, sheriffs, and federal agents, we created Heroes to meet the growing national need beyond law enforcement.
Heroes is forever grateful to the ground-breaking work that went into EPIC and ABLE, and is honored to carry the active bystandership torch to a wider audience. Heroes is founded upon the same social science foundation pioneered by Dr. Staub years ago. Indeed, while ABLE and Heroes are not formally associated, we share instructors and continue to collaborate in many areas. Heroes comes from a proud past and is honored to continue the effort to, as Ted Quant says, create stories that will never be told because nothing happened.
A Little About Our Background
Heroes History
