Developed with communities, not for them
Through the late 1980s and the 1990s, CTC was tested and refined in a participatory process with hundreds of American communities, at times more than 470. The system was adapted to communities of very different kinds. Two problems common in prevention practice were the explicit targets: the use of measures without adequate evidence, and the poor implementation of programmes that had been shown to work.
CTC was therefore built around local coalitions of key people from different sectors: local government, schools, youth services, police, health services and civil society. These coalitions learn to identify their community's specific risk and protective factors using the CTC youth survey, a standardised questionnaire completed by school pupils, to set priorities, and to select and implement evidence-based programmes with attention to quality. The structured five-phase process, with clear milestones from readiness through to evaluation, became the hallmark of the approach.
The scientific confirmation came with the Community Youth Development Study. Launched in 2003, this randomised controlled trial in 24 rural towns across seven US states followed more than 4,400 young people from fifth grade into early adulthood. Its results confirmed the logic of the model at each step:
- System change: CTC communities were measurably more likely to adopt a science-based approach to prevention and to improve cooperation across sectors.
- Fewer risks, stronger protection: targeted interventions produced measurable improvement in the factors each community had prioritised.
- Less problem behaviour: young people in CTC communities started using alcohol and tobacco later, and showed significantly lower rates of substance use, violence and offending.
- Effects that lasted: at age 21 the differences persisted, and a twelve-year benefit-cost analysis found that every dollar invested had returned nearly thirteen.
The evidence page sets out these findings in detail, alongside the Australian replication and the more cautious verdicts from Europe.
Arriving in Europe
CTC crossed the Atlantic in the late 1990s. The United Kingdom was first: between 1998 and 2008 the charity Communities that Care UK worked with more than sixty sites in all four nations, around thirty of which ran the full process, with Wales and London most strongly represented. Its operations ceased in 2009. The Netherlands followed and, for some fifteen years, built the broadest European CTC practice: more than 25 municipalities and neighbourhoods, guided by the Netherlands Youth Institute with DSP-groep's youth survey and evaluated by the Verwey-Jonker Institute. No Dutch community is known to run the process today. Germany adopted the approach through the EU-funded SPIN project (2008–2011), led by the Crime Prevention Council of Lower Saxony, with the first pilot sites starting in 2009. Cyprus (from 2006), Croatia and Sweden each ran their own adaptations; Austria adapted and piloted the youth survey in a single Upper Austrian municipality, Sierning, in 2013.
Between 2013 and 2015 these efforts were connected for the first time. The EU-funded project Communities That Care European Network: Making CTC work at the European level brought together partners from seven countries to answer three questions. Does the CTC youth survey measure the same thing across borders? Which prevention programmes have actually been tested in Europe? And how should a new country go about introducing the approach? Its answers, a cross-national survey analysis, a European programme review that fed the EUDA's Xchange register, and an implementation guide, remain the foundation for CTC work on this continent.
This site continues that work. It is operated by FINDER e.V., a German non-profit that provides CTC training and survey infrastructure, and it exists to make the European adaptations visible to each other, and to the countries that do not yet have one.