Research, practice and CTC communities across Europe.
15 of 15 articles
Whether support is targeted at the neighbourhood or at the individual school or nursery decides how accurately it lands and whether an institution recognises itself in the numbers. A design question for every data-driven prevention effort, including Communities That Care.
Reducing behavioural health risks requires a comprehensive range of prevention and treatment services delivered by professionals housed in various community-based provider silos. Law enforcement is an important silo that has not been closely associated with prevention, and particularly not with evidence-based prevention programmes. Yet within communities there are well-defined prevention roles that law enforcement can play to support and enhance ongoing prevention work. The paper discusses these roles and guidelines and makes recommendations for the training and functioning of police officers within a prevention framework.
The research on religion as a protective factor is extensive, and more complicated than it looks. Meta-analyses show consistent associations between religiosity and lower substance use. But conceptual blurring, measurement problems and blind spots point to a different conclusion: what protects is not “religion” or “spirituality” but the psychosocial mechanisms behind them – self-regulation, social integration, moral orientation – and those are not confined to religious settings.
The first systematic review of whether Communities That Care reduces youth violence, commissioned by the UK Youth Endowment Fund, finds around ten per cent less violence in CTC areas, an estimate that narrowly misses statistical significance. The results, the recommendations, the UK verdict, and how to read it.
A 2025 research brief from the Washington State Prevention Research Collaborative summarises what positive childhood experiences (PCEs) do across the life course and across generations, and how practitioners and policymakers can build them, with the Social Development Strategy as the proven approach. Presented here for a European readership.
An evaluation of Communities That Care in two disadvantaged Denver neighbourhoods: youth violence fell by 75 % in one, and not at all in the other. What the difference reveals about the conditions for success, and what follows for European cities implementing community prevention.
Prevention succeeds where the head of the municipality makes it a matter for the top. An analysis of the leadership role of mayors and council leaders in local prevention and positive youth development, and of the alliance with the council, the administration and civil society that it requires.
The US National Academies have set out what a national infrastructure for preventing mental, emotional and behavioural disorders would need: evidence, a workforce, data, governance, funding and implementation. The diagnosis is American; the questions it raises will sound familiar in most European countries, and Communities That Care answers several of them at the local level.
Birgitta Månsson, a CTC trainer from Sweden, describes how Malmö turned the Social Development Strategy into a programme of its own: certified trainers, more than 3,000 adults trained across five CTC areas, and 18 of 24 risk factors down in one area after two years.
The principles of Communities That Care are clear; whether they change anything is decided by how well a community implements them. Eight factors from the implementation research, the evidence behind them, and a fifteen-point self-check for coalitions.
Positive youth development builds on young people’s strengths rather than on avoiding problems. Toumbourou et al. (2023) trace its history, its spread across countries and its growing evidence base. This article presents the five key domains, the Social Development Model behind them, and what it means for community prevention.
The Australian CTC intervention for adolescent alcohol prevention proved highly cost-effective: every dollar invested returned AUD 2.60 in benefit, and 93 % of the savings came from reduced crime and violence. A case for the wider social relevance and economic value of community-based prevention.
The most common objection to Communities That Care is that it is too deficit-oriented, a technocratic import into social work. In fact CTC was developed in a school of social work and described by its authors as a model of social-work practice. What it adds is the thing the profession has long lacked: a way of making its own principles operational, and evidence of effect at system level.
Communities That Care rests on a community-randomised trial that followed 4,407 young people into adulthood. What it found, what it did not, how replications outside the United States have fared, and how to read the cautious 2025 UK verdict.
Cross-sector cooperation, working from evidence and lasting implementation are the three challenges of municipal prevention, and Communities That Care was built to meet all three. An adapted overview of the system, its theory of change, its five phases and the evidence behind it, from a 2023 peer-reviewed article.
News from the countries, meeting dates and calls for joint work. Low traffic, in English.
Join the listQuestions about CTC in your country, about the survey or about a text on this site.
Get in touch