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Building Community Collaborations For Families: What Works? UHI Quarterly Symposium featuring Dr. Richard Catalano About Richard Catalano Richard Catalano, PhD, is the director of the Social Development Research Group and Bartley Dobb Professor for the Study and Prevention of Violence in the School of Social Work at the University of Washington in Seattle. His work has focused on discovering risk and protective factors for positive and problem behavior, and on designing and evaluating programs to address these factors. He is the co-developer of the Social Development Strategy, which provides a theoretical basis for risk- and protective-focused prevention. Dr. Catalano has also co-developed parenting, school- and community-based prevention programs designed to enhance positive youth development and prevent problem behavior. Communities That Care Developed by Dr. Richard Catalano and Dr. J. David Hawkins, Communities That Care (CTC), is a landmark prevention-planning system that provides strategic consultation, training and research-based tools to help communities work together to promote the positive development of children and youth and to prevent adolescent problem behaviors. CTC is designed to mobilize community leaders to identify elevated risk factors and depressed protective factors in the community, and to select and implement a set of tested preventive interventions to reduce elevated risk factors and promote protective factors. CTC is based on successful public health models and guides communities through the five most critical and challenging steps in this process, from community mobilization through outcomes evaluation. CTC has been implemented in approximately 25 communities across the country and has been extremely well-researched. CTC is evaluated through The Community Youth Development Study, a 5-year intervention study designed to determine the effectiveness of the CTC in promoting healthy youth development and reducing levels of youth drug use, violence, delinquency, teenage pregnancy, and school dropout. Early findings from the first group-randomized trial (Hawkins et al, 2008) confirmed that CTC’s theory of change that it takes from 2 to 5 years to observe community-level effects on risk factors and 5 or more years to observe effects on adolescent delinquency or substance use. Specifically:
Click here for Community Youth Development Study Publications. Social Development Research Group (SDRG) SDRG's research seeks to promote achievement and success as well as prevent and treat health and behavior problems among young people—addressing problems such as drug abuse, delinquency, risky sexual behavior, violence, and school dropout. The mission of the SDRG is to understand and promote healthy behaviors and positive social development among children, adolescents, and young adults by:
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