Developing and sustaining a successful community prevention initiative: The Hampton Healthy Families Partnership

Abstract

This article documents the processes behind a community-based prevention initiative. It describes how city leaders used a crisis created by increasing demand for services and decreasing resources to shift to an investment in prevention. Support for better parenting was identified as the strategic investment most likely to ensure school success and later workforce participation, and a new partnership and organizational structure was developed to implement the initiative. Key components of the organization are described and critical elements of the program model and evaluation results are presented. Specific attention is paid to the community's plan for taking the initiative to scale through system conversion-a comprehensive reorganization of city services. To provide useful information for others interested in developing sustainable community-based prevention initiatives, lessons learned that transcend this specific model are described.