As Fern Buntyn queried people about potentially threatening situations, she stressed the importance of close observation — or of being attuned to the small details sometimes muffled by louder noises and brighter sights.

“What behaviors do you see?” she asked. “We can’t see intent, we can’t see feeling — we can only see the behavior or the action.”

Buntyn, a certified Green Dot trainer, was among those who conducted a free bystander intervention workshop in the East Mississippi Electric Power Association Auditorium on Wednesday. The workshop springs from the international Green Dot program, designed to help bystanders respond to various kinds of threatening situations, such as child abuse, sexual assault, stalking and domestic violence. The goal is to create spots of “green” to counter the “red” spots of violent or potentially violent situations.

Care Lodge Domestic Violence Shelter and Wesley House Community Center collaborated to offer the training — the second this year after staff and community members received training in the Green Dot bystander intervention program.

The program comes recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“A study found that Green Dot was associated with reductions in unwanted sexual victimization and sexual harassment, stalking, and dating violence victimization and perpetration on a college campus implementing the program compared to two comparison campuses without the intervention,” according to the CDC’s website.

A key task, organizers say, is to engage as much community participation as they can.

“We really want to get this out to different facets of the community,” said Sara Smith, community coordinator for Care Lodge, in an interview. She said the training was particularly useful for “community relief service providers and their clients.”

Smith stressed the importance of contacting police or other trained authorities when they see or suspect problems, rather than opting for the virtual grapevine.

“A lot of people like to alert the community on social media,” she said. “It’s my belief that that can potentially do further harm because they’re not alerting the proper authorities. It’s almost like rumor-spreading.”

Smith noted, too, the importance of noticing those things that warrant reporting.

“If we see someone who looks like a minor … in the middle of the week while school’s going on, we should contact the authorities because they could be a runaway or an at-risk youth,” she said. “They could be a victim of trafficking and nobody would ever know because no one says anything.”

Smith said, too, that it’s important to let authorities know if people are in trouble in other ways — such as a car stalled out on the road.

People who attended the workshop played various scenarios, sometimes answering questions anonymously, thanks to technological aid, about how they might react to a situation — such as that of a co-worker who comes to work one day and discusses a fight that “turned physical” with his girlfriend.

Deidra Stewart, who works as a family advocate, therapist and prevention educator for Wesley House Community Center, stressed the importance of being an “active bystander.” She mentioned, for instance, the helpfulness of being proactive and “doing something before it starts,” as well as being “reactive” when the situation calls for it.

Stewart shared a story with the group that she recounted later, during an interview. When she was about 8 years old, she said, her best friend was abused by her mother. One night an ambulance took away her friend, and she never discovered what happened to her — though she heard word that she had been beaten. Stewart said she wished people in the neighborhood had called before the danger reached that level.

Stewart noted, too, the options represented by the words “direct,” “delegate,” and “distract.” Bystanders, she said, can choose various ways to intervene or to defuse a tense situation.

Most of the people at the workshop were connected with either Care Lodge or Wesley House Community Center, though members of the organization Angel Wings Outreach Center, who came to Meridian from Mendenhall, also attended the workshop.

Deana Weems, who works at Wesley House as a therapist, forensic interviewer and prevention educator, said future bystander workshops may target certain parts of the community — such as healthcare workers — at their own sites. It’s a point that Smith noted, as well.

“It looks like we’re going to have to take it to where the people are,” Weems said.

Weems also noted that broad swath of community members who could benefit from the workshops.

“It is applicable to a diverse group,” she said.