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Our Work

CSPV is the external evaluator and technical assistance provider for the implementation of Communities That Care (CTC) in Colorado. CTC is an evidence-based model that engages and mobilizes local communities to make data-driven decisions to address critical behavioral health issues in the community. CTC communities focus on primary prevention by creating policy, systems, and environmental changes and integrating evidence-based programs locally. These efforts aim to improve protective factors and reduce risk factors and adverse behavioral health outcomes in Colorado youth.

Our Evaluation

We employ multiple types of evaluation to understand the impact of CTC in Colorado.

Process Evaluation of Coalitions: Administer annual electronic surveys to facilitators and coalitions to learn how CTC stakeholders engage in the process.

Process Evaluation of Primary Prevention Strategies: Monitor local community data to understand how various components of community efforts contribute to success in community-wide systems change.

Fidelity Evaluation: Track progress on achieving milestones and benchmarks that are part of the internal CTC fidelity tool.

Outcome Evaluation: Assess short-term, intermediate, and long-term outcomes by using public health, hospital, education, criminal justice, and additional administrative datasets available in Colorado and the surrounding Rocky Mountain area. These data function as comparisons in a quasi-experimental research design.

Our Technical Assistance

We build community capacity to implement and evaluate community-level strategies that change systems and support youth. We specifically assist communities to:

Collect and Interpret Data: We support communities in locating relevant data sources or collecting their own data, identifying important indicators to understand the local situation, and subsequently interpreting these data to inform local decision-making and action.

Implement Best Practices in Research: We help communities translate scientific research into practice, by supporting integration of best practices in local planning efforts to address community needs.

Evaluate and Improve Local Efforts: We make evaluation fun! We work with communities to identify indicators to measure progress and to monitor prevention strategies regularly. The evaluation plans emphasize the importance of monitoring over time, to ensure that the community is able to adapt and improve their efforts to meet changing needs.

 

Our Partners

We are an academic-government-community partnership, and are the better for it.

We are grateful to be funded by and partnered with the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, Violence and Injury Prevention – Mental Health Promotion Branch.

We support 47 CTC communities throughout Colorado. Each community has a coalition to carry out the CTC process and a facilitator who coordinates all CTC efforts locally.

Our Impact

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We provide updated process and outcome findings annually, as the communities will continue to receive investment in their CTC efforts until 2021.

We build knowledge and skills of communities to implement community-wide systems changes, collaborating on the development of resources to guide their learning:

We build capacity of communities to develop local implementation and evaluation plans, and to monitor and improve their efforts over time.

We have created beautiful partnerships with local communities in the state:

  • “Our partnership with CSPV has been absolutely vital to the successful implementation and evaluation of the Communities That Care project in the state of Colorado. The team at CSPV is consistently friendly, courteous, collaborative, and professional. They go above and beyond in their work, and offer exceptional expertise in evaluation, translation, and implementation science.”

    Colorado Evaluation Partner

  • “The CSPV team that supports our community’s CTC effort is phenomenal. They help us to understand the overarching concepts as well as the pesky little details that make up a comprehensive approach to engaging a whole community in substance use and violence prevention. We owe a large portion of our continued success in this arena to the CSPV team.”

    Colorado CTC Coordinator

  • “The CSPV team never stops working to provide us with the support we need to guide our community through the CTC process. What’s even more special about the team is they exhibit dedication, compassion, and can be trusted to do the right thing.”

    Colorado CTC Coordinator