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

Abstract

Community-based coalitions have been advocated as a promising mechanism to reduce youth involvement in violence, delinquency, and substance use, but coalitions have not always been successful in ensuring widespread adoption of evidence-based prevention strategies. This paper describes the strategies used by 12 community coalitions to collaborate with schools to select and implement school-based prevention programs, including the barriers to establishing coalition/school partnerships and methods for overcoming these challenges.In this five-year research project, all communities adopted school-based prevention programs. Coalitions helped achieve this outcome by building relationships with school personnel, fostering champions within the school, creating win/win situations in which schools' needs were addressed, and initiating school-based prevention programs as pilot efforts that were later expanded. While success was achieved in all cases, persistent messaging about the importance of youth problem behaviours was needed to overcome schools' concerns about using academic time to teach prevention messages and replacing current practices with unfamiliar programs.Findings from this study can be used by coalitions and prevention scientists that want to partner with schools to reach a large population of students with effective prevention programming. The results are also of value to researchers and practitioners interested in fostering widespread dissemination of other types of evidence-based programs.