Sustainability of Local Community Prevention Systems: Factors Influencing Local Team Functioning and Longevity in Communities That Care and PROSPER

During the past 15 years there has been great interest in the development of community prevention delivery system infrastructures.  The goal of developing these infrastructures is three-fold.  First, by so doing, one potentially empowers local communities to make cohesive decisions about how to spend prevention dollars and carry on prevention activities; this can, as a result, improve community social capital and, possibly, outcomes for youth.  Second, such systems have been shown to improve the implementation quality of evidence-based programs.  Third, developing local expertise and decision-making creates the opportunity for communities to sustain coordinated structures that help to maintain high-quality prevention decision-making for local communities.

This presentation will discuss findings from over 10 years of research with the PROSPER Partnership Model and 15 years of studying Communities that Care (CTC), in over 100 sites. PROSPER is a model for broad delivery of evidence-based interventions (EBIs), designed to assess the ability of land-grant universities’ Cooperative Extension System structures to disseminate EBIs through local community teams.  28 communities were randomized to test the effectiveness of this model that links prevention scientists with structures supporting the broad reach of the Cooperative Extension system, in order to create local community-based teams that implement EBIs.  CTC is a community prevention system, although one that is not associated with university structures or CES but, rather, one that provides technical assistance directly to local communities.  Data is derived from over 3000 interviews and questionnaires from key leaders in over 100 communities.

This presentation will discuss similarities and differences in factors that influence high-quality functioning of these local community coalitions/teams, including factors related to internal coalition functioning (board leadership, membership, turnover) and external functioning (relations with community, press, policy-makers, funders) . The presentation also will address factors that are related to failure-rates, or lack of sustainability of the local coalitions themselves.  The discussion will focus on a number of interrelated issues, primarily concerning the importance of ongoing and developmentally-appropriate technical assistance to meet the organizational needs of local teams, as well as their ability to use data and influence to raise the sustainability funds necessary for independent, long-term, local viability.