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Keeping It All Together:
Ideas For Sustaining Your Initiative

Foreword

While the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Center for Mental Health Services has instituted the School Violence Prevention Initiative, as with other programs, it is not permanent. Its funding is not guaranteed; grants have ends. Nothing guarantees the ongoing success or continued existence of evidence-based violence prevention programs that have been implemented in localities across the U.S. While communities with successful programs hope to keep them going as long as they are needed, sustaining a violence prevention effort requires foresight and commitment from all of the partners, coupled with ongoing support from the community as a whole.

The local resources that support community violence prevention programs can come from school districts, community mental health centers, and other organizations that build coalitions out of a commitment to preventing youth violence and strengthening the community. It is important to maintain such support over time, especially in view of the fact that completing a single prevention program is not sufficient to reduce or eliminate school violence permanently. Continuing the program depends on an ongoing community effort to sustain the measures that have been found to be successful.

The importance of maintaining the program can be seen not only by looking at the reduction in school violence, but also by observing the improved cooperation among the community organizations lending their support. ACTION Pamphlet 5, Keeping it All Together: Ideas for Sustaining Your Initiative, is intended to assist you in finding ways to continue this valuable community effort.

A few years ago, a school-based Head Start program wanted to implement a drug prevention project for parents of preschoolers. Consultants were called in to design the project. The consultants asked if the parents/caregivers had been asked if they wanted such a program and, if so, what they wanted to know. The administrators replied that they had done a brief survey and that parents were “worried about drugs.” The consultants, not completely satisfied with that answer, said they wanted to talk directly with parents and find out from them why they would (and would not) want to attend such a program and what they would want to learn. Six parents from the target community met with the consultants and explained to them why they would not want to be involved in such a program. The primary reason? “You’ll get us involved, and then you’ll leave, and we’ll have nothing.”

Sadly, this story is not uncommon in human services. Interventions are funded. People in resource-poor communities with many residents at high risk become the focus for interventions. Communities gladly accept and welcome the program, and then funding runs out. People feel betrayed. Funding often is used to document program effectiveness, not to assure program continuity. Although not all organizations and programs should continue in perpetuity, they should be sustained as long as they serve a vital community purpose.

Sustainability has been described as a way of characterizing a process of evolutionary continuation, such as a neighborhood taking ownership of an intervention. The term also implies that the entity can respond to changes in circumstances. This crucial capability supports both evolution and continuation.

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