How Well Do Community Prevention ‘Coalitions' Function? the Case of the Australian Government's Communities for Children Partnerships

Introduction: It is widely acknowledged that, in order to address complex adaptive problems such as youth crime, systemic approaches like collective impact initiatives are required. Within these methodologies multiple sectors work collaboratively to address agreed goals that are measurable using evidence-informed initiatives. In this presentation we report early findings of a large Australian Research Council Linkage Project that is being undertaken by researchers working in partnership with five state and federal government departments and five major non-government organizations.

Methods: Working within the framework of the Australia-wide Government funded Communities for Children (CfC) program, the project draws on recent research in prevention science to build and test a Prevention Translation and Support System (PTSS). The PTSS combines a rich array of electronic resources, including measures of child wellbeing and parent efficacy, with the capacity building efforts of Collective Impact Facilitators. These project staff are working with the research team and community partnership leaders in five intervention communities, with another five communities as matched controls, to develop processes and resources within child-serving agencies to strengthen the way partnerships identify and agree on goals for child wellbeing and mobilise to address them.

Results: This paper reports results of the analyses of a survey of 161 partnership members and 11 semi-structured interviews with partnership leaders across 10 CfC communities. These surveys were undertaken to generate baseline data on the ‘health’ of community partnerships. The data show that the partnerships are not yet collaborations, in that they lack clear, unified goals and hence they have no well-formulated processes for measuring outcomes (as opposed to outputs) or for achieving them through shared contributions that are explicitly planned in the light of shared goals. These findings are informing the interventions in the five communities.

Conclusions: The data highlight a key problem experienced by community partnerships: the processes required by the federal government inadvertently militate against collaborative practice by leading partnerships to over-focus on the activities of individual agencies at the expense of the capabilities of ‘the collective’.