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 article describes the strategies used
by 12 community coalitions to collaborate with schools to select and implement
school-based prevention programs; it includes the barriers to establishing
coalition/school partnerships and methods for overcoming these challenges. In
this 5-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.
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