Future directions for community-based prevention using CREATE Project tools, resources and methodologies

CREATE-ing Pathways to Child Wellbeing 2020 Seminar Series

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GCI held the seventh CREATE online seminar on 15 October 2020. A copy of the presentation slides and a recording of the presentation is available for viewing below.

Governments in Australia and across the developed world have ambitious policies to deliver services to improve child and youth wellbeing in disadvantaged communities. The Australian Government funds national place-based initiatives like Communities for Children and Stronger Places, Stronger People; state governments fund family support services to keep at-risk children out of the child protection system; and schools implement a wide range of behaviour management and other programs. 

With notable exceptions like Communities That Care, developed at the University of Washington in the United States but now implemented worldwide, the links are patchy at best between these place-based programs and the extensive body of scientific knowledge about how to foster the positive development of children and prevent child and youth problems like antisocial behaviour and crime, school dropout, and substance abuse.

Over the past 7 years the CREATE-ing Pathways to Prevention Program has developed human and electronic infrastructure designed to strengthen the capabilities of schools, community residents, and child and family serving agencies to be agents of community-wide change based on good science.

The development of the Collective Change Facilitator role along with outcomes measures such as, the Parent Empowerment and Efficacy Measure and PEEM Online (Parent’s Voice), and Rumble’s Quest; as well as coalition strengthening tools such as the Coalition Wellbeing Survey System; and all the processes, methodologies and activities embedded in the CREATE Change Cycle constitute important advances in the continuing process of translating the fruits of prevention research into effective community practices, at scale. 

This webinar will discuss the future directions for community-based prevention in Australia. Drawing on advances in Prevention and Implementation Science we will discuss how CREATE tools, resources and methodologies can be used to drive innovations in practice as well as inform knowledge development through research. 

We will propose as a practical strategy the formation of intermediary organisations within which respectful relationships between community members, policy people, frontline professionals, and researchers can be developed and sustained. These supportive collaboratives, maintained by skilled system intermediaries like Collective Change Facilitators, optimise the ‘research translation’ conditions needed for co-creation processes to flourish and for new measurement instruments, tools, methodologies, and evidence-based resources to be developed that are responsive to local contexts, empower local people, and are suitable for use by frontline professionals as well as by community members and sometimes relatively untrained practitioners.

This presentation was led by CREATE Project Co-director Professor Ross Homel, Principal Research Fellow Dr Kate Freiberg, and Senior Research Fellow Dr Sara Branch – Griffith Criminology Institute.

View a copy of the presentation slides here.