Local prevention coalition has increasingly global reach

- Private group -
Sat, 09/21/2013 - 7:45am

Five Town Communities That Care’s impact on the prevention of problem adolescent behaviors in the local community has been well documented. What is not as well known is the impact it is having further afield. With a rapidly growing number of communities around the world choosing the CTC system to address problem behaviors in their populations, Five Town CTC is increasingly finding itself on the front lines of prevention.

 

Dalene Dutton, Five Town CTC’s executive director, has been traveling a great deal in the last year and a half to train communities in CTC. Communities in Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, California, and Manitoba have called on Dutton. The revenues she receives are reinvested here in the local effort. In recent months, Five Town CTC has fielded new inquiries nearly every week. 

 

This week, two cohorts of trainees made the trip to Maine to learn more about getting CTC started back home. They underwent three days of intensive participatory instruction at Five Town CTC’s office in Rockport.

 

Katie Ritzenheim and Gery Shelafoe traveled from the Upper Peninsula in Michigan to continue training they started with Dutton there. Juliana Mejia and Mayra Paredes made the long journey from Bogota, Colombia.

 

Mejia and Paredes represent Nuevos Rumbos, a Colombian agency dedicated to research and prevention of drug use. The agency has been working with the creators of the CTC system at the University of Washington’s Social Development Research Group (SDRG) to develop a similar system they call Comunidades Que se Cuidan (CQC) in Colombia. Nuevos Rumbos has been piloting the CQC model for a year and a half. SDRG put Nuevos Rumbos in touch with Dutton when they wanted to learn more about the on the ground challenges of training other communities.  Next, Juliana and Mayra will accompany Dutton to Parlier, California to observe a training she is leading in the largely Spanish-speaking community there.

 

Dr. Kevin Haggerty of SDRG also participated in the Rockport trainings. For 27 years, he and his colleagues have been developing methods to organize the scientific knowledge base for prevention in ways that empower parents, communities and schools to use it to organize, assess and prioritize approaches that meet their needs. Dr. Haggerty notes, “I’m impressed with the work of the Five Town coalition to create the conditions that promote well being. You serve as a model for other communities across the nation, and around the world.”

 

CTC is grounded in rigorous research from social work, public health, psychology, education, medicine, criminology, and organizational development. It engages all community members who have a stake in healthy futures for young people and sets priorities for action based on community challenges and strengths. Clear, measurable outcomes are tracked over time to show progress and ensure accountability.

 

Communities in cultures as seemingly different from each other as Michigan’s, Maine’s, or Colombia’s, nevertheless often share similar difficulties with adolescent substance abuse, violence, delinquency, school failure and other problem behaviors. By addressing the unique circumstances of any given community, using local data to drive decision making, increasing the use of evidence-based programs and polices, and including stakeholders from all sectors of the population in the prevention effort---CTC has proven to make a positive difference in children’s lives wherever it is employed.