Today, hundreds of Federally-funded drug and alcohol-focused community coalitions operate across the United States, joined by many others that rely primarily upon state or private funding. The watchword these coalitions share is prevention, and the overriding challenge they live for is to offer effective support for our nation’s youth in living a healthy and drug-free lifestyle.

At conferences, in online events, and in our work with such coalitions, there is a key question on everyone’s mind: “What preventive strategies work most effectively in our distinctive community, and how do we know whether we are succeeding?”

As an evaluator, I think those are great questions. Really, they comprise the bottom line for any strategic effort. I also believe that these coalitions are in an excellent position to answer these questions—not in the abstract, but in terms of their own community, their own neighborhoods, and the youth they know and seek to serve. It is possible to discover what works—and what doesn’t work—to achieve a particular prevention goal in a particular community.

I believe this for two reasons.

First, drug and alcohol prevention advocates today are blessed to working in one of fields that lead the nation in the priority they give to evidence-based strategies. A glance at the high quality resources offered by CADCA, the Center for Disease Control, and CPWI’s Athena Forum, and others confirms that contemporary drug and alcohol prevention strategies must answer to healthy scientific questions like “So what?” and “Prove it.” And several scientifically grounded prevention approaches, such as the positive community norms model are generally meeting that test.

It was not always this way. In a future post, I’d like to tell the cautionary tale of DARE, an approach to drug and alcohol prevention that for years was almost universally agreed to be a terrific, commonsense program—until the evidence rolled in that the DARE model was actually ineffective, and in some cases actually caused harm. But we’ll get to that another time.

Here’s the second reason that community coalitions are in a great position to know whether what they are doing is effective. It’s the simple fact that by embedding an evaluation component in your coalition’s work, you potentially gain much more than the snapshot of performance that your funder typically requires.

More than a snapshot, a well-constructed evaluation provides a roadmap that can guide program decisions. This roadmap is simply an evidence-based framework to help you and your coalition understand what works, why it works, and which kinds of youth in your particular community are able, as a result of your efforts, to limit or eliminate specific dysfunctional behaviors.

So, what’s the difference between a snapshot and a roadmap? Well, an evaluation that is built around the traditional logic model that grant contracts usually require is fully capable of meeting said grant requirements—but it will be very limited in shedding light on why your program has, or does not have—an effect (in fact, this limitation is probably one reason that most coalitions tend to forget about their logic model between progress reports—it’s just not especially useful in their day-to-day work).

To understand why your program does or does not work requires an  added dimension. Sometimes referred to as a theory of change, this added dimension is a carefully operationalized piece that expresses why you believe your program works. Once you’ve articulated that why in a testable way and measure what actually happens, then you are able to understand what parts of your program are genuinely effective, what needs tweaking, and how to tweak it.

In our work we refer to this logic model + theory of change as an action map – a simple single-page document that summarizes (testably) the core of your activities as a coalition, tracks your successes, and aids in deciding your next steps as a coalition.

So: great resources and the tools to ensure their suitability and effectiveness in your distinctive community—it’s a great time to be a part of the drug-free community coalition movement!