Resource

The Promise of Comprehensive Community Initiatives

January 24, 2018

Academic, health, and social inequalities are pervasive for children, youth, and families in cities across the United States. Changing this situation and improving the conditions of success for young people require a wide variety of supports both in school and throughout the broader community.
 
CCI Cover
Comprehensive community initiatives (CCIs) are a potentially promising way to organize supports throughout a community and have attracted interest from philanthropy and public policymakers. Sometimes referred to as cradle-to-career initiatives or collective impact, CCIs are locally organized, multi-sector collaborations that build local capacity and coordinate resources towards a common, population-level goal. Many CCIs facilitate collaboration among health, education, business, and community-based organizations to improve the overall health and wellbeing of people in the community.
 
A need to understand the state of the evidence for CCIs comes from their  increasing popularity, along with the significant investment of time and public and private resources to implement them. That’s why the Center for Promise – on behalf of the Weiss Institute – conducted a systematic review of CCIs focused on child and youth outcomes to bring together all of the existing evidence of their impact.
 
From an initial list of nearly 2,000 articles, Center for Promise researchers identified five CCIs that used systematic methods for validly assessing impact, and demonstrated impact on population-level outcomes. These CCIs include Communities that Care (CTC), PROmoting School-community-university Partnerships to Enhance Resilience (PROSPER), Kentucky Incentives for Prevention (KIP) Project, New Directions, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (SAMHSA-CSAP) Community Partnership Program.
 
Broadly, these five CCIs have helped communities increase population-level protective factors and reduce risk factors; primarily in the public health domain.
 
The authors next analyzed characteristics and components of the five CCIs that appeaCCImechanisms.png r to drive change. These include:
 
  • Collaborative governance structure
  • Comprehensive planning
  • Resources and sustainability
  • Evidence-based prevention programming
  • Monitoring implementation
  • A culture of inquiry

Why this matters

Education-oriented CCIs were largely absent from the authors’ review of impact studies. This is not meant to suggest that community-wide collaborative efforts to impact education for youth are nonexistent or ineffective. In fact, several initiatives, including Promise Neighborhoods, Collective Impact, and Say Yes to Education maintain a strong commitment to improving educational outcomes for youth. However, this research underscores a critical need to design rigorous evaluations that can offer high-quality data to guide the field of education, in similar ways as the CCIs in this review have done for public health and prevention science. The findings from the systematic review provide cautious optimism that CCIs can impact population-level outcomes for children, youth and families.

This systematic review and its research brief are the first research publication of the Weiss Institute.
 

Download the research brief

Download the systematic review

About the Authors

Weiss Institue

The Weiss Institute, a partnership between Say Yes to Education and the Center for Promise, the research center for America’s Promise Alliance, will expand the capacity of communities to make it possible for all young people to earn a college degree or other postsecondary credential. To learn more, visit www.WeissInstitute.org

Center for Promise

The Center for Promise, in collaboration with Boston University School of Education, is the first-ever research center for America’s Promise Alliance. The mission of the Center is to develop a deep knowledge and understanding about what is needed to help create the conditions so that all young people in America have the opportunity to succeed in school and life. The Center’s work will add to the academic exploration of these issues and help give communities and individuals the tools and knowledge to effectively work together to support young people.

Social and Emotional Learning
The 5 Promises

The 5 Promises represent conditions children need to achieve adult success. The collective work of the Alliance involves keeping these promises to America’s youth. This article relates to the promises highlighted below:

Caring Adults Caring Adults Safe Places Safe Places A Healthy Start A Healthy Start Effective Education Effective Education Opportunities to Help Others Opportunities to Help Others

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