Imprint

The working body of a CTC process: practitioners who run schools, youth centres, family services and clubs, together with residents and, ideally, young people themselves. The board reads the community profile, sets priorities and chooses the programmes. It is distinct from the key-leader group, which provides the mandate and the resources. Called Gebietsteam in Germany and community board in the US.

The social-work tradition of enabling residents and local institutions to identify and act on their own needs, rather than having services delivered to them. CTC’s authors place the approach explicitly in this tradition: the community collects its own data, sets its own priorities and owns its own plan. Known as Gemeinwesenarbeit in German-speaking countries.

The randomised controlled trial that established the evidence for CTC. Begun in 2003, it matched 24 small towns in seven US states in pairs and randomly assigned one of each pair to CTC, following more than 4,400 young people from age ten into adulthood. Young people in CTC towns started using substances later, showed less delinquency and violence, and the differences persisted to age 21.

The geographical unit a CTC process works in. Not an administrative boundary but the area whose residents share schools, services and daily life, and whose practitioners know each other. Choosing it well matters: the youth survey area and the action area must coincide, or the coalition ends up acting on a profile the area does not recognise. Called Sozialraum in German.

An approach that treats adolescence as a period of growth to be supported rather than a set of problems to be prevented, and that works on competence, confidence, connection, character and contribution. It shares its theoretical roots with CTC in the Social Development Model, and CTC’s emphasis on protective factors is where the two meet.

Conditions that lower the likelihood of problem behaviour and promote healthy development: strong bonds to family, school and community, clear standards, opportunities to contribute, the skills to use them, and recognition for doing so. In the Social Development Model they are what bonding is made of. Strengthening protection counts as much in CTC as reducing risk.

Conditions in a young person’s family, school, peer group or neighbourhood that raise the likelihood of problem behaviour such as substance use, violence, offending or leaving school early. Many act on several outcomes at once. CTC measures them locally through the youth survey and asks the community to prioritise the ones that are most elevated.

Aaron Antonovsky’s question of what keeps people healthy, as opposed to what makes them ill. Its central idea, a sense of coherence built from comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness, corresponds closely to the protective factors CTC works with. The term is widely used in European health promotion and less so in the US prevention literature.

The developmental theory behind CTC, formulated by Richard F. Catalano and J. David Hawkins. It holds that young people bond to the social units, prosocial or antisocial, that give them opportunities, the skills to use them and recognition for doing so, and that they then adopt those units’ norms. Prevention therefore means creating those three conditions in family, school and community. The Social Development Strategy is its practical form.