Keeping Families Together: Using Communities That Care for Community Child Maltreatment Prevention

The prevention of mental, emotional, and behavioral (MEB) disorders among children and adolescents is a national priority. One mode of implementing community-wide MEB prevention efforts is through evidence-based community mobilization approaches such as Communities That Care (CTC). This session provides an overview of the CTC framework and discusses the adaptation process of CTC to prevent development of MEBs through preventing child abuse and neglect and bolstering child well-being in children aged 0 to 10. Adaptations to the program include revising language to focus on early childhood, adding earlier risk and protective factors to the community assessment, and expanding the list of evidence based programs for early childhood programming.  Adaptation also required changes to the evaluation instruments including revising the Milestones and Benchmarks, the Community Key Informant Interview, and the Community Board Interview.  Findings from the Keeping Families Together (KFT) pilot study of this adapted approach suggest that implementation was manageable for sites. Both sites implemented Phases 1 through 4 in approximately 1 year compared to traditional CTC trial sites that implemented in 9 to 24 months. Furthermore, on a scale from 1 (Not at All Challenging) to 4 (Very Challenging), the mean implementation challenge ratings ranged from 1.34 to 1.53, compared to the 12 traditional CTC trial sites, whose ratings ranged from 2.49 to 2.64. KFT community boards performed slightly better than traditional CTC trial site boards on a prevention knowledge quiz, they performed comparably on community support/readiness, and time spent fundraising, although they performed slightly lower in regard to board member participation. KFT sites were slightly behind traditional CTC trial sites in their progress toward adoption of a science-based approach to prevention. Implications and next steps are outlined.