Strengthening Community Research Articles

Strengthen School and Community Capacity

Creating capacity in schools and communities promotes academic, social, and emotional competence for all students, including those with serious emotional disturbance as well as those with incipient or identified emotional or behavioral disorders. Capacity building in school settings is a multifaceted systemic process implemented through a flexible continuum of school-based primary prevention, early intervention, and intensive intervention services. This comprehensive approach recognizes that school environments can be adaptive systems with the potential to prevent or ameliorate behavior problems. Successful capacity-building efforts are closely tied to other target area initiatives, especially collaborating with community agencies and establishing partnerships with families. We draw on the research on educational restructuring and an analysis of case studies of system change to identify cross-cutting themes important to the implementation of capacity-building efforts. Implications for sustaining capacity-building efforts are also discussed.

Healthy communities: reflections on building alliances in Canada. A view from the middle

The author is currently working in the office of Health Promotion, Ministry of Health in British Columbia. For the past 17 years she has worked in Health and Welfare Canada as an advocate for citizen participation in developing health programs and policies. This article is based on her experience as an advocate and bureaucrat in translating and mediating health promotion rhetoric into action. The Canadian Healthy Communities and Strengthening Communities projects are used as examples in analyzing the opportunities and contradictions in building alliances.

Using the Civic Index to Strengthen Community Leadership Programs

Using the Civic Index to Strengthen Community Leadership Programs

A Public Agency Project to Strengthen Client and Community

A Public Agency Project to Strengthen Client and Community

Co-ordination of Services as a Means of Delinquency Prevention

The South Central Youth Project was based on the assumption that juvenile delinquency is part of the child- rearing problem of the whole community. Prevention there fore demands co-operation and co-ordination among all the organizations of the community related to youth and aimed at the creation of a healthy community climate. Accordingly, this Project did not consist in the establishment of a new agency but was rather a co-ordinated effort on the part of law- enforcement, health, and welfare agencies and of public schools in an area of high delinquency. The Project focused on de tection of the beginning signs of delinquency and on finding concrete means to improve interagency communication and co-operative efforts. On the basis of its experience, the follow ing suggestions for carrying on such work in the future were made: (1) Establish Practitioner Committees from sufficiently small geographic areas to meet regularly to make plans for cases needing concerted community effort. (2) Increase the flexibility of established agency structures and functions. (3) Realize the importance and difficulty of the "aggressive case work" and "street-corner group work" approaches and train selected practitioners for this task. (4) Increase the use of community education; co-ordinate the work of all agencies to change community culture. (5) Strengthen community efforts capable of early detection and attention to juvenile problems as for instance the services of school social workers and youth agencies using qualified professional personnel.