2009 · Study · English

If at First You Don't Succeed ... Keep Trying: Strategies to Enhance Coalition/ School Partnerships to Implement School-Based Prevention Programming

Fagan, A. A., Brooke-Weiss, B., Cady, R., & Hawkins, J. D.

Fagan, A. A., Brooke-Weiss, B., Cady, R., & Hawkins, J. D. (2009). If at First You Don't Succeed ... Keep Trying: Strategies to Enhance Coalition/ School Partnerships to Implement School-Based Prevention Programming. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 42(3), 387–405. doi.org/10.1375/acri.42.3.387

Summary

Practice-oriented paper from the Community Youth Development Study on how 12 Communities That Care coalitions in the United States worked with local schools to adopt school-based prevention programmes. Over the five-year project every community succeeded in placing evidence-based programmes in its schools, but rarely at the first attempt. The authors document the strategies that worked: building relationships with school staff, cultivating champions inside the school, designing win–win arrangements that met schools’ own needs, and starting with small pilots that were later expanded. Persistent communication about the extent of youth problem behaviour was needed to overcome concerns about surrendering teaching time and replacing familiar practices with unfamiliar programmes. The account is descriptive rather than evaluative, but it is one of the few systematic records of coalition–school negotiation and directly useful for European CTC boards, whose school partners raise the same objections.