Making Practice Perfect: Here’s How To Equip Families And Communities For Success

And this brings me back to my original question: how do we equip our communities to support children, youth, and families, using the best available science? Just having the program or intervention science available, while helpful and necessary to get us going in the right collective direction, apparently isn’t enough. We also need to make use of what we know about effective implementation and scale-up of those programs.

To do this well and sustainably, our state and community systems must shift the ways in which we do business. Evidence and lessons from implementation science suggest that we need to better develop readiness among our community service organizations for implementing new programs. Local leadership and team structures need time and space to innovate, engage with adaptive challenges, and ensure implementation success and sustainability. Our community practitioners must be given the opportunity to benefit from ongoing learning and coaching so that they can deliver innovative programs as intended in ways that respond to family needs. Data monitoring and evaluative processes need to be aligned to identify community needs, conduct quality assurance, and optimize intervention effects over time using data-based quality improvement. And, for population-level impacts, the role of media and social networking strategies must be continually explored as tools to move beyond direct service provision alone.

Just like raising children, these tasks take a village. The advantages of using coalitions of community service agencies and partners to achieve wide scale impacts are becoming clearer. And conversations are accelerating about the need to involve an array of co-creation partners with unique resources, skills, and perspectives, including families themselves, in the local design and scale-up of evidence-based programs. Quite often, state and community systems benefit from external implementation support provided by intermediary organizations and expert technical assistance providers.

Ultimately, supporting science-based strategies for children, youth, and families may be sound policy for federal, state, and local governments, as well as nonprofits and other community service organizations. But they can only own and sustain these strategies, and achieve their promised impacts, by shifting business as usual. They must embed across service sectors the kinds of capacity and practices that are associated with successful and sustainable implementation. The Duke Endowment is helping lead the way by funding the development and initial evaluation of an implementation support plan for Triple P. Testing is slated for Wake, Buncombe and Madison counties.

And I guess this leaves us to ponder another question: what’s my role in helping equip our communities to support children, youth, and families, using the best available science? What role will you play? State and community leaders in North Carolina are having these conversations around Triple P. I invite you to engage with us. After all, it takes a village.

Will Aldridge is the Advanced Implementation Specialist for the FPG Child Development Institute, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also serves on the Board of Directors, National Prevention Science Coalition. To learn more about how FPG Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is supporting the scale-up of Triple P in North Carolina, visit http://​ncic​.fpg​.unc​.edu.