“Someone will notice, and someone will care”: How to build Strong Communities for Children

Child Abuse & Neglect 41 (2015) 67–78

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Child Abuse & Neglect

Research article

“Someone will notice, and someone will care”: How to build Strong Communities for Children夽 Robin J. Kimbrough-Melton ∗ , Gary B. Melton Colorado School of Public Health and University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora, CO, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Available online 9 March 2015

Keywords: Child abuse and neglect Prevention Neighborhoods Community

a b s t r a c t Derived from the recommendations of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect, Strong Communities for Children is a universal community-wide approach to prevention of child maltreatment. It is intended to change community norms—to facilitate informal support for families and to strengthen parents’ belief that they can improve the quality of life for their own and their neighbors’ families. A phased intervention, Strong Communities begins with recruitment and mobilization of volunteers, initially to spread Strong Communities’ messages and ultimately to provide direct assistance to families of young children. Principle-driven, Strong Communities uses assets in the community to expand and strengthen networks of supportive relationships and, in particular, to increase support to parents. At least in concept, Strong Communities appears to be applicable in highly disparate communities and societies. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction Derived from the strategy proposed by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect (1993; see also Melton & Barry, 1994; Melton, Thompson, & Small, 2002), Strong Communities for Children is a comprehensive community-wide initiative for the promotion of family and community well-being and prevention of child abuse and neglect. The underlying premise is that, to be effective, child protection must become a part of everyday life—“embedded in the settings where families live, work, study, worship, and play” (Melton, 2014b, p. 333). The ultimate goal of Strong Communities is to keep kids safe (prevent child abuse and neglect) by strengthening participating communities so that every child and every parent knows that if they have reason to celebrate, worry, or grieve, someone will notice, and someone will care. Strong Communities involves the whole community through voluntary assistance by neighbors for one another, especially for families of young children. Community organizations and individual volunteers join to leave no family outside. All are guided by the principle that people shouldn’t have to ask—that help should be built into community settings in a manner that is “natural,” responsive, and non-stigmatizing. The process used in Strong Communities is designed to promote normative change in perceptions, beliefs, and behavior. As illustrated by the statement of penultimate goal, caring is at the heart of Strong Communities. By reform and, in some instances, creation of community settings to make noticing others’ needs and triumphs easier and expectable, Strong Communities promotes attentiveness to the experience of young children and, even more so, their parents. Of course, “noticing” makes a difference in young families’ lives only when it is paired with “caring.” Thus, through messages repeated often in

夽 This article is based on an initiative supported by a generous grant from The Duke Endowment to the Clemson University Research Foundation. ∗ Corresponding author. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2015.02.015 0145-2134/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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diverse settings about the opportunities for application of the Golden Rule, Strong Communities promotes neighborliness as a community value and behavioral expectation. By facilitating broad community engagement, Strong Communities also is designed to enhance optimism about the situation for children and families in the community. The experience of observing and, better, directly participating in community activities to promote child and family well-being reinforces the belief, individually and collectively, that action on behalf of families will be effective. Such experiences stimulate the perception that the community is a welcoming and supportive place and the expectation that the experience for families in the community will be positive. Such optimism is believed to translate ultimately into norms for action. Thus, Strong Communities is intended to promote a local culture typified by a moral norm: the belief, individually and collectively, that the possibility of effective action on behalf of families should be expressed through such practical activity. Such a widely held moral norm, when given life through action, builds the belief that such practical activity will occur, because it is the thing to do, a social norm that pervades life in the community. With at least partial replications now planned or underway in selected communities in Colorado and Israel, the single instance of full implementation of Strong Communities was in a portion of the Greenville, South Carolina, metropolitan area. In an extensive multi-method program of evaluation research, Strong Communities was demonstrated to stimulate large-scale community engagement, with deepening and increasingly diverse participation by thousands of volunteers and hundreds of organizations across the participating communities (Berman, Murphy-Berman, & Melton, 2008; HaskiLeventhal, Ben-Arieh, & Melton, 2008; McDonell, Ben-Arieh, & Melton, in this issue). Activities followed principles outlined later in this article, but their form varied, in order to match divergent community assets and needs (Murphy-Berman, Berman, & Melton, 2008). Such activities had a high level of personal meaning to volunteers (Haski-Leventhal et al., 2008) and sometimes were truly transformative at both community (Murphy-Berman et al., 2008) and individual (Hashima & Melton, 2008) levels. Such community mobilization was especially potent in communities with relatively limited social and economic resources (McLeigh, McDonell, & Melton, in this issue). With changes measured across time and relative to matched communities (McDonell et al., in this issue), surveys of parents of young children in the participating communities showed increased social support, collective efficacy, and parental efficacy and decreased parental stress. Parents in the participating communities also were more likely to report use of household safety devices (e.g., baby gates), and they also became more attentive and less neglecting toward their children. This self-report was corroborated by changes in the frequency of substantiated cases of neglect (in child welfare archives) and diagnosed child injuries possibly resulting from abuse or neglect (in hospital archives). This article is intended to provide an overview of principles and strategies used in Strong Communities. Such information should be useful in interpreting the evaluation results and planning further implementation of the service model. In that regard, although Strong Communities was designed as an intervention for prevention of child maltreatment, it may have wider application, given the evidence that it can improve family and community well-being (McDonell et al., in this issue), perhaps especially in low-resource communities (McLeigh et al., 2015). Thus, Strong Communities may be useful in improving overall quality of life. Strong Communities applies “our highest aspirations to the seemingly inconsequential actions of everyday life. Communities in which children feel safe, in which they are heard, in which they and their parents are treated with respect, and in which there are strong norms of caring and mutual assistance would be fine places to live” (Melton, 2005, p.656). In short, the steps that must be taken simply to implement Strong Communities—for example, engaging many people across a community in building resources for families—are goods in themselves that arguably should be undertaken even if they could not be demonstrated to result in a reduction in child abuse and neglect (Melton, 2013). Accordingly, Strong Communities is a high-value intervention in itself. The changes observed in improved safety for children are important additions to that intrinsic value. This emphasis on both building and capitalizing on community assets is compatible with the argument that prevention efforts would be more effective if they moved from a singular focus on prevention of the particular problem to full acceptance of the need to promote healthy development (Daro & Benedetti, 2014; cf. Wald, 2015). It goes even further, however, to posit that community-building will create the conditions that sustain families and, by so doing, ensure children’s safety, promote their sense of security, and enable their development as full participants in community life. The Strong Communities Approach Overall Strategies The mounting evidence that adequacy of social and material support are critical to children’s safety (Pelton, 2015; Thompson, 2015) has been accompanied by increasing interest in community interventions to prevent child maltreatment (see, e.g., Dodge & Coleman, 2009; Molnar & Beardslee, 2014). In that context, Strong Communities is distinctive in that it is universal, comprehensive, and dependent on the engagement of volunteers and primary community institutions (e.g., businesses; child care centers; civic clubs; local governments; neighborhood centers; public safety agencies; religious organizations; schools). The linchpins of Strong Communities are community outreach workers. They implement two general strategies. First, they facilitate community engagement and leadership development to enable communities to accept responsibility for parent

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Table 1 Operationalization of community mobilization principles. Principles of community mobilization Principle 1. Outreach activities should be logically related to the ultimate outcome of reducing child abuse and neglect. Principle 2. Outreach strategies should be directed toward the transformation of community norms and structures so that residents “naturally” notice and respond to the needs of children and their parents. Principle 3. Outreach activities should continuously “push the envelope.” The objective is not necessarily the implementation of discrete programs but instead the continuous creation of settings in which Strong Communities’ core message is heard and applied. Principle 4. Volunteer recruitment, mobilization, and retention should be ongoing components of outreach activities. Principle 5. Outreach activities should be directed toward the establishment or strengthening of relationships among families or between families and community institutions. Principle 6. Outreach activities should include a focus on the development of widely available, easily accessible, and non-stigmatizing social and material support for families of young children.

Principle 7. Although the ultimate goal is the protection of children, outreach activities are directed toward parents. Principle 8. Outreach activities should be undertaken in a way that enhances parent leadership and community engagement. Principle 9. Whenever possible, outreach activities should facilitate reciprocity of help.

Principle 10. Outreach activities should be designed so that they build or rely on the assets (leadership, networks, facilities, and cultures) in and among the primary institutions in the community.

Operationalization of principles Community festivals provided opportunities for parents to get to know their neighbors and to experience success in improving the well-being of families. After parents saw that they could make a difference in the community, events focused on caring for children were organized. Using community volunteers and donated professional time, family activity centers were organized in existing community facilities. The Centers enabled families of young children to access support easily.

The core message of Keeping Kids Safe was repeated in many ways in multiple settings. E.g., local governments erected signs at town entrances to declare their municipality to be a Strong Community for Children. Firefighters wore StrongCommunities pins on their uniform and emblazoned Strong Communitiesmessages on their fire equipment (e.g., “Our family helping your family; Leaving no family outside”). As the numbers of volunteers grew, outreach workers recruited volunteers to manage volunteers. For example, churches had volunteer coordinators who themselves were volunteers Community events based at parks, libraries, schools, fire stations, family resource centers, and churches and in residential neighborhoods brought together families from across neighborhoods to get to know each other. Community and family nursing students provided in-home health assessments for families who otherwise did not have easy access to health care. An apartment complex serving predominantly single mothers renovated an apartment to serve as a family room where mothers and their children could gather, access information, and get to know their neighbors. Career and financial planning was provided to young parents by volunteer bankers and financial advisors. Play groups for young children were organized. Although the groups provided socialization for children, the primary purpose was to give parents an opportunity to interact with each other and to share parenting ideas. Grandmothers parenting grandchildren organized support groups to share information, babysitting and to have fun. An internet-based network was established to connect families who needed support with families interested in giving support. The one stipulation of membership in the network was that those providing help had to agree to receive a meal from the network once a month and to let network members know when they had needs. Community organizations used their facilities to create informal activities that were staffed by community volunteers. For example, outreach staff worked with a family resource center to establish a cultural center for newly arriving immigrant families.

support and child safety. In this context, they convey the vision of Strong Communities to community members, mobilize individual citizens and organizations to become involved in helping families, and facilitate the development of activities that enable community members to incorporate the vision into their everyday life. Second, capitalizing on the volunteer resources that they have organized, the outreach workers stimulate the development of additional support for families of young children. In effect, outreach workers rely on the grassroots movement that they initiate to provide direct but often informal support to families across the service area. In so doing, they often facilitate the development of new volunteer-delivered services in settings not commonly identified as providers of family support services (e.g., churches; fire stations; libraries; parks). Reliance on Principles The outreach workers do not follow a “cookbook” of strategies. Instead, they are encouraged to be creative and diligent in identifying opportunities to strengthen community support for families with young children and developing ways to take advantage of these opportunities. They are guided by 10 principles derived from research on the factors affecting children’s well-being and their safety in their homes and neighborhoods (Table 1). The use of principles allows the outreach workers to use their judgment and knowledge of the community, its culture, and its assets to design effective strategies to mobilize residents and community organizations. The principles also keep the initiative on track by establishing expectations about the kinds of activities that are related to achieving the desired outcome of safety for children. For example, as the seventh principle indicates, outreach activities are directed to parents,

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not children. However, it is common for community groups to think first about activities for children (e.g., reading stories to children). Although there is value in such efforts, they typically do not relate to children’s safety. Finally, the principles remind the outreach workers of the goals and values underlying the effort. Thus, the principles often suggest how help should be provided, not just what should be done. For example, activities should promote reciprocity of help (Principle 9), enhance parent leadership and community engagement (Principle 8), strengthen relationships among families and between families and community institutions (Principle 5), and change community norms and structures (Principle 2). In an initiative that continues to get bigger as more volunteers are engaged, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The principles help to keep the outreach workers focused. The Process of Change Getting Started in Strong Communities The initial phases of Strong Communities are oriented toward the community’s gradual assumption of responsibility for family well-being and child safety. Consequently, outreach workers are initially focused on engaging community members to become involved in the Strong Communities initiative. Subsequently, these community members are instrumental in organizing the settings of everyday life to make help for parents easily accessible and available. When parents feel supported in their parenting responsibilities, they are more likely to feel that they can make a difference in the well-being of their own and their neighbors’ children (Melton, 2014b). The first step in mobilizing the community is to get to know the community. The outreach workers in the Greenville initiative began by reviewing readily accessible information (e.g., yellow pages; city planning documents; newspapers) and driving around the communities to become familiar with the neighborhoods and the institutions within them (e.g., schools; workplaces; places of worship; recreational facilities). Using a snowball approach, the outreach workers also identified and talked with key community leaders about their perception of safety for children. Conducting a resource analysis at the outset can be helpful in understanding the culture of the community and in identifying gatekeepers, existing social and professional networks, and opportunities for developing new connections within the community. Analogously, focus groups of parents can provide information about the challenges in their daily lives and the people who “naturally” offer help in confronting them. Organization of such groups also can itself be a catalyst for change. Work with community settings (e.g., child care centers) to convene such meetings can be important in stimulating their full engagement in the initiative. The parent meetings themselves may not only result in ideas about tasks and activities, but they also may be a forum in which to promote parent leadership and facilitate the development of mutual assistance. Similarly, outreach workers beginning their work often find it helpful to organize working groups of individuals knowledgeable about particular topics germane to a comprehensive community-based approach to child protection. For example, it is harder for parents to care for their children in safety if the physical environment is dangerous. More subtly, the physical environment can indirectly affect children’s safety by “demanding” or preventing easy interaction among neighbors. So one of the groups that we organized to plan activities during the initiative focused on neighborhood security. It included property managers, real estate agents, firefighters, law enforcement officers, and neighborhood leaders. Like other working groups on economic security, civic leadership, etc., the working group on neighborhood security had creative ideas for involving residents in projects to improve the neighborhood safety. The group also stimulated leadership by some local figures (e.g., a small-town fire chief) who would not usually be sought for involvement in a child welfare project. Phases of Implementation Although outreach workers have considerable latitude in developing community-specific activities based on the 10 principles, Strong Communities is implemented within a framework of four overlapping but generally sequential phases (Melton, Holaday, & Kimbrough-Melton, 2008). The phases logically build upon one another: 1. Spreading the word to raise awareness about the nature of child protection and to identify opportunities for enhanced family support. 2. Mobilizing the community to become engaged in developing and implementing plans to prevent child maltreatment. 3. Increasing the resources for families to obtain non-stigmatizing help whenever and wherever they need it. 4. Institutionalizing the provision of resources so that help is sustained over the long term. Phase 1 focuses on spreading the word among community leaders and community residents about the nature of child abuse and neglect. There are two near-term goals in this phase. First, it is important to build an understanding of the nature of the problem and, with that understanding, a sense of perceived responsibility among community members to Keep Kids Safe. Therefore, early in the implementation of Strong Communities, it is critical to help the general public understand that most of the cases reported to state and county child protection authorities are for neglect (and most do not involve willful neglect) and not physical abuse. We strive to spread the knowledge that most parents in the formal Child Protection System are not “bad” or even “sick” people. Rather, they have an array of complex social, economic, and psychological problems—problems that often escalate as neighborhoods deteriorate. We also want residents to understand that reporting a problem to child

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Table 2 Implementation steps by phase. Phase

Steps for implementation

1. Spreading the word

• Begin individual meetings with key gatekeepers (e.g., ministers; property managers; small business owners; civic club leaders; “natural helpers” in the neighborhoods) to educate them about the initiative and the assumptions that guide it and to identify key social networks in the community. • Begin systematically to identify and personally contact representatives of all primary community institutions in the service area. These may include churches and other places of worship, businesses and other workplaces, civic organizations (defined broadly; include, e.g., garden clubs and other special-interest groups that may undertake specialized volunteer service), neighborhood associations, community public safety agencies (e.g., local police and sheriff’s departments; fire departments; emergency medical services), local governments (i.e., counties and municipalities), schools, and providers of primary obstetric, pediatric, and family health services. Tailor the message to fit the particular institution’s mission and service area. • Organize community working groups to develop priorities and community action plans.

2. Mobilizing the community

• Enlist individuals in helping with community activities aimed at engaging families • Begin to mobilize volunteers in groups (e.g., Sunday School classes; workplaces; civic organizations) to increase the numbers of volunteers and the level of activity. • Host special events (e.g., block parties, baby fairs, health fairs) to continue to spread the word and to deepen community engagement • Organize campaigns (e.g., Shaken Baby; pledge card) to reinforce the message and to obtain commitments for service.

3. Increasing the resources for families

• Use the institutional and personal relationships developed in phases 1 and 2 to increase resources for families. • Obtain organizational commitments to engage families of young children in universal services at “natural” transition points (e.g., pediatric well care, enrollment in kindergarten). • Continue to organize special events that are focused on enhancing resources for families (e.g., Talk with the Doc events to give parents a chance to ask health questions) • Begin to engage families with the greatest needs

4. Institutionalizing resources

• Obtain commitments for donated professional time to support services for families. • Organize family activity centers using volunteer time and donated professional time. • Organize more intensive supports for families with the greatest needs.

protective services is usually not sufficient to ensure that children are safe. Developing this understanding among community residents early in the initiative is critical to establishing a new norm of community responsibility for children’s safety and for laying the foundation to begin substantive conversations about strategies for keeping kids safe (Table 2). Second, spreading the word is aimed at creating a “buzz” in the service area as the first step in creation of new behavioral norms. We intend to put the issue of child protection on the proverbial radar screen. Strong Communities spreads a message that is easily learned, undebatable, and universal—to Keep Kids Safe. This message allows citizens and community leaders to come together despite differences in socioeconomic background or in political and religious beliefs. Several strategies are helpful in spreading the word and laying the foundation for community engagement. First, outreach workers can begin by “knocking on doors” and engaging in one-to-one conversations with gatekeepers in the community. Gatekeepers are people who are in authority in a particular setting but they are not necessarily “community leaders” (e.g., elected officials) who frequently appear in the news media or who are well known throughout a county or a metropolitan area. For example, property managers may be key informants in understanding the situation for residents in particular housing developments. Similarly, community police officers may have broad knowledge about the challenges facing young families on their beat, and they may be able to identify particular residents who are widely regarded as opinion leaders or sources of social support. At the same time, it is also important to inform more conventional community leaders (e.g., officers in the Chamber of Commerce) and formal service providers (e.g., directors of Child Protective Services) about the Strong Communities initiative and to brief them periodically. Not only do such individuals often have access to resources useful in the initiative, but they also can undermine the initiative if they give uninformed opinions about it. Moreover, their joining as volunteers can give instant credibility to the initiative. They can serve as both messengers (using organizational newsletters, for example) and models for the community at large. Discussions with gatekeepers and sometimes with more widely known community leaders can be important in identifying individuals who become the exceptional volunteers of Strong Communities and who are able to “open” the doors to the community. These individuals may not necessarily be high-profile individuals, although they often are gatekeepers in their work (Hashima & Melton, 2008). Generally, the exceptional volunteers in the Greenville initiative were individuals who had a long-time, often religiously motivated commitment to service. They were gratified to find that they could make a difference in Strong Communities not just with individual families but also with particular institutions or even the community as a whole. They typically were involved in multiple settings and activities and indeed were often the volunteers who generated ideas and started projects (Berman et al., 2008; Hashima & Melton, 2008). Community working groups also are organized during the first phase to help develop an action plan for improving safety and enhancing services for families. These groups are instrumental in prioritizing strategies, obtaining consensus,

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and then building coalitions to implement the ideas. The strategies that emerge from this process often are quite varied and community-specific. For example, the community working group in one small town that was struggling economically decided that revitalizing their community would make it safer. To inform their process, several community leaders took a field trip to a neighboring town outside the service area (approximately 50 miles away) to learn how they had improved the economic condition. Their final plan included strategies that ranged from strengthening the climate for business to implementing a variety of family-friendly activities (e.g., movie nights) and settings (e.g., a toy library), in each instance using donated space and volunteer labor. In essence, the outreach worker and the lead volunteers developed a plan that enhanced material resources, gave evidence that the community could make positive changes for families, and created sustainable settings intended both to facilitate the growth of relationships and to provide foci for continuing concerted community action. In contrast, the community working group in a higher resource community created a set of criteria outlining the characteristics of a family-friendly workplace for young families and then worked with local businesses to incorporate the vision. In the same community, the police organized events such as bike rodeos to get to know children, and the local hospital organized the first car seat safety checks. These events were a vehicle for parents to discuss child safety issues with the outreach workers, health professionals, and public safety officers. Thus, where organizations were already present and resources were relatively abundant, the emphasis was less on creation of new settings and more on establishment of a community-wide priority for assurance of child safety. In Phase 2, outreach workers begin mobilizing the community. By this point, they have established relationships with many community members, identified areas of concern, discovered assets of strengths within the community, and developed a cadre of volunteers to carry the message into the broader community. Mobilization focuses on obtaining commitments for involvement by organizations, a key element in efficient recruitment of volunteers and establishment of venues for reciprocal help. In essence, the emphasis shifts to recruitment of large numbers of volunteers. Organizations (e.g., churches) and their constituent groups (e.g., Sunday School classes) can enable efficient recruitment and provision of opportunities for mutual assistance and outreach to the community as a whole. For example, religious congregations helped to spread the message of Keeping Kids Safe in sermons, bulletin inserts, and newsletters, at special events, and through Blue Ribbon Sabbath observances during the national Child Abuse Prevention Month (April). These activities often were the beginning of congregational activity. Special events (e.g., community festivals; block parties; health fairs; baby fairs; Blue Ribbon Sabbath) are also key strategies for mobilizing large numbers of volunteers and reinforcing the message (Murphy-Berman et al., 2008). Special events can get people out of their homes and into the community where they can interact with one another. For example, block parties can be especially effective in mobilizing neighborhoods that are more disorganized (e.g., higher levels of crime; transience; fewer institutional resources). That families are out together and involved in safe activities that they helped to plan is an important experience in neighborhoods where residents may have lost—or never had—confidence in their ability to improve the quality of life for their families. In the Greenville initiative, for example, a subdivision of a small town neighborhood that was mixed-income, mixedethnicity, and a combination of single-family homes and rental properties held a block party after a shooting that polarized neighbors even more than they were initially. The organizers invited the local police department and the sheriff. The organizers also arranged for food, entertainment, dancing, and inflatables for the children. In the end, the block party brought residents out of their homes to talk with each other, interact with the public safety representatives, and sign up to participate in Strong Communities. Families were eager to become involved in developing strategies to keep their children safe. When the evening was over, residents committed to forming committees to work on safety, including planning future block parties and other events where children and their parents could interact. Campaigns are another strategy that may be useful in producing the “aha” moments that move people to action. A campaign to prevent shaken baby syndrome can be designed to focus less specifically on the message of “Don’t shake the baby!” than the questions of how isolation of stressed parents (including fathers) can be reduced and how parents might have easier access to help at times of acute stress. Similarly, pledge cards can be used to begin discussions and raise awareness. Each resident may be asked, for example, to pledge to “learn the names of the children in the 10 houses closest to me” and to “do my best to notice and show that I care when a child or a child’s family has reason to celebrate, worry, or grieve.” Such a strategy is especially well suited to religious congregations, where pledge cards can be put into offering plates as a sign of commitment. However, the range of settings in which circulation and signing of pledge cards can be undertaken is broad. For example, one town included pledge cards with water bills for its residents and with paystubs for its employees. We also have found symbolic signing of poster-size pledge cards to be useful in both concretizing the discussions and providing a media photo opportunity at community luncheons. In the Greenville initiative, campaigns often led to broader engagement. For example, the shaken baby campaign was the “hook” that engaged a large Missionary Baptist church in one community. They focused their campaign on reaching fathers through various church activities, including basketball games. They then used the campaign to identify other ways that the church could support Strong Communities, including use of their facilities for family activities and service by church members to mentoring high-need children. Another church disseminated pledge cards at a church service on Keeping Kids Safe during Child Abuse Prevention Month. Members who pledged their time then initiated planning committees within the church to identify specific activities. One of

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the more creative ideas was the development of an Internet-based network of volunteers who committed to helping others (Taylor & McLeigh, in press). Called Network 6:2 after the biblical passage Galatians 6:2 (exhorting Christians to “bear one another’s burdens” in emulation of Christ), members of the network provided meals for others, located new housing for families living in unsafe areas and moved them, and mobilized donations of everything from diapers to furniture for families in need. The Network helped any family in need in the community (not just families in the congregation) who came to their attention. Perhaps the most creative element of Network 6:2 was the expectation that every member would receive a meal each month that was prepared by others in the Network. This stipulation for participation normalized the giving and receipt of help among members of the Network. It also ensured that the members would have some direct personal contact with each other, not simply electronic communication. During Phase 3, the outreach workers focus on engaging the institutional and personal relationships developed in the prior phases to increase social and material resources for families within community settings. These resources may range from babysitting exchanges to donated legal services. During this phase, outreach workers begin to implement universal assistance for families of young children. This task can be accomplished by establishing organizational commitments for service (e.g., pediatric well care) and by enrolling or enlisting families of young children in services at natural transition points (e.g., birth of a baby; enrollment in kindergarten) or through community events. Finally, activity in Phase 4 is directed toward institutionalizing the resources that result from the mobilization of citizens and organizations. Transformation of community norms and structures occurs when action on behalf of families becomes routine. For example, communities in the Greenville initiative developed enhanced pediatric well care as a means of facilitating family support (cf. Rushton, Byrne, Darden, & McLeigh, in this issue; Rushton & Kraft, 2013). Other innovations directed toward sustainable change included, e.g., volunteer-administered emergency social services, a model partnership with a school district in the service area, and a Latino community center that served as a gathering place for families. Strong Families Joining a Movement During Phase 3, outreach staff work with the base of individual and organizational volunteers who were mobilized in the first two phases to implement universal assistance to families of young children. Strong Families is the direct service component of Strong Communities. Embedded in primary community institutions, Strong Families is designed to normalize support to families of young children by engaging families at ordinary transitions (e.g., the birth of a baby; entry into preschool and kindergarten). Families are encouraged to join Strong Families at entry points into health care, education and community organizations. Joining (not being referred, a passive and stigmatizing position) gives parents access to family supports, including activities designed to connect them with other parents of young children. For example, pediatric well child care may be reorganized to provide group sessions for parents and to strengthen anticipatory guidance. Similarly, community professionals may collaborate in convening morning coffee time and other meetings and social events to enable parents of children in kindergarten to form networks, build leadership, and engage in the community. All families enrolled in Strong Families also receive Connections, a newsletter adapted from Healthy Steps’ Linkletters (see http://healthysteps.org/publications-and-related-links/healthy-steps-materials/), which are designed to prepare parents for discussions of topics in well child visits. Connections also informs parents about developments in Strong Communities and invites them to join in various activities. Family Activity Centers The centerpieces of Strong Families are family activity centers. By high-profile volunteer-based provision of “friendly” services (e.g., family fun days) to families across the community, they encourage the development of a shared expectation that all families and their children will be noticed and cared for and a moral norm that the community should not leave parents without assistance in carrying out their responsibilities. Apart from the services themselves, family activity centers offer venues in which families come together, so that it is easy “naturally” to notice when families need assistance. Family activity centers are established by community organizations, often in concert with an outreach worker, in existing facilities (e.g., schools; churches; fire stations; libraries; parks). They use volunteers to offer at least five core activities: play groups (intended to be gathering places for parents); family recreational activities; parents’ nights out; career counseling and financial education (typically offered to young parents by volunteer financial planners or bankers); chats with family advocates (generic free assistance on a drop-in basis, provided by volunteer helping professionals). A monthly calendar is disseminated to families who have joined Strong Families to let them know when and where activities are scheduled, but the activities are open to all. Support to Families in Greatest Need Any effort to support parents has to reach families with the greatest need. Fulfillment of the goal to “leave no family outside” requires intentional efforts. Although we demonstrated in Strong Communities that such a goal is achievable, it

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takes time to establish a foundation of informal and formal support to assist families in crisis or in chronic need. Staff and volunteers reach out to families to provide both material and social support. In so doing, they encourage marginalized families to engage as helpers in family activities, not just as recipients. They develop multifaceted plans, often using contributed resources, to mitigate multiple severe problems. They also strive to learn from the problems faced by individual families to address community-wide needs, and they use community events to identify and sometimes to meet the needs of individual families. In so doing, community advocacy and individual or family advocacy and direct services are integrated (cf. Melton, 1983, on clinical child advocacy). In Strong Communities, such assistance is often informal—sometimes even within a formal agency program. In the Greenville initiative, a family resource center was the base for Strong Communities. Hence, multifaceted, integrated care using volunteer and mutual assistance was blended into various agency-based services within the center (e.g., instruction in English as a second language; GED [high-school equivalency] classes; a club for Hispanic immigrant families; an intimate partner violence treatment program; a community health center; a church-related emergency relief agency). Outreach workers assisted in engagement of community organizations and individual volunteers to assist in meeting multiple needs. For example, a request to the emergency relief agency for assistance in paying a utility bill resulted (through an outreach worker) in a connection to a neighborhood association for emotional support, a successful plan for obtaining employment, and greater access to child care. In such a context, being a volunteer in Strong Communities only occasionally means signing up to provide a particular service or to lead a particular activity. Even in those instances, the strategy is to move from participation in particular activities (for example, helping to set up a community luncheon) to adoption of Strong Communities as a way of life—to transform daily activities and community norms to conform to Strong Communities’ principles. Volunteerism grows into neighborliness (Haski-Leventhal et al., 2008). For example, scholarship in the child welfare field virtually ignores firefighters except for their role in preventing juvenile fire-setting (but see Haski-Leventhal & McLeigh, 2009, an article that emerged from the Strong Communities initiative). However, they are exceptionally well suited for broad service to families. They typically have a safety mission, respect in the community, easy access to homes and businesses, and unallocated time. They often have a secondary mission (e.g., emergency medical services) that is compatible with identifying and fulfilling both individual and collective family needs in the community. Fire departments also often engage volunteers in doing some or all of their work. Thus, in proportion to their numbers, firefighters were the most active volunteers in the Greenville initiative. (In absolute terms, churches were the biggest source of volunteers and volunteer time.) One small fire department in a low-resource, ethnically diverse area was key to gathering residents for neighborhood meetings early in the initiative. Later, they built a new fire station and included a front porch with rocking chairs (including child-sized rockers). They included community meeting rooms, and they were a source of emergency food and other basic resources. The fire department displayed Strong Communities’ logo on their uniform and its slogans on their trucks and signs in the yard of the station. The firefighters organized a community festival. They secured bicycle helmets and worked with the outreach worker, who was made an honorary firefighter, and a property manager to organize parents to ensure that the children wore the helmets. Every firefighter saw several children every day and worked with their families to be sure that they were involved in their supervision. They made special efforts to ensure that young mothers-to-be were receiving prenatal care. The list goes on and on. The firefighters did not work longer, but they incorporated Strong Communities principles into their daily routines. Already service-oriented, they re-conceptualized their work, so that they became models of neighborliness. Perhaps the innovation that was closest in form if not necessarily in content to a traditional volunteer program was the initiative’s adaptation of Safe Families, a program developed by Lydia Home in Chicago (Anderson, 2014). Framed as an alternative to foster care, Safe Families uses volunteers who receive no reimbursement to provide care in their homes to children in need of a place to stay, typically for months. Although the children are often already known to Child Protective Searches, the shift of residence is voluntary, and the host families strive to be partners to the biological parent, who makes the decision when the child will return home. In Safe Families, the host parents are almost always recruited through churches; the parishioners show hospitality toward children and families in great need (see Melton, 2014a). Other church members may provide assistance (e.g., furnishings; emotional support) to the host families or the biological parents. In the Strong Communities version of Safe Families, initiated after an extensive network of volunteers was developed, some volunteers (recruited from a variety of sources, not just churches) were invited to indicate a variety of services that they would be willing to provide, including overnight care. Most of the prospective volunteers checked the entire list. A substantially smaller proportion of referrals resulted in a change in children’s living situation than in the ordinary Safe Families programs, because resources were often generated to meet needs that otherwise would have resulted in foster care. For example, while providing emotional support, volunteers might assist a family in finding safe housing, child care, or furniture. However, hosting a child in a volunteer’s home might occur when situations would arise that required someone other than the parent to provide care for the child for a while but in which state custody was unnecessary. For example, when a parent with a weak social network is hospitalized or arrested, a partner family is needed to care for the child, but the urgent need does not indicate that adequate care is not ordinarily provided by the parent. In concept, both the original version of Safe Families and the Strong Communities variant rely on the community to provide supplementary, not substitute care for children.

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One Person Can Make a Difference Characteristics of Effective Outreach Workers In the Strong Communities initiative in metropolitan Greenville, all of the outreach workers had experience working in communities, but none had experience as a community organizer. At the same time, their relevant prior work gave them credibility especially when the workers started with sectors that they knew best. For example, a former elementary school principal began her mobilization work with the schools. A former parish nurse began by mobilizing health programs at churches and a nearby industrial park. The list of prior occupations of the various outreach workers shows their diverse skills and interests: e.g., school administrator; rehabilitation counselor; minister; clinical-community psychologist; newspaper editor; director of Meals on Wheels; 4-H Extension agent; health educator; volunteer organizer of two non-profit organizations; United Way executive; YMCA program leader; religious educator; teacher and Ronald McDonald House board chair. In selecting outreach workers, we learned that it was not necessary for outreach staff to live or to have lived in the community to be effective in their mobilization efforts. It was more important that they had a commitment to community development and a willingness to work varied hours to participate in community meetings. The outreach workers were as likely to work on the weekends and in the evenings as in the daytime hours. Indeed, to facilitate community connections, some attended services at multiple churches each Sunday. We also learned that the most effective outreach workers were those with excellent verbal and written communication skills and problem-solving abilities. They were creative, personable, flexible, and able to thrive on ambiguity. They were able to consider multiple strategies for reaching their goals when they encountered barriers. By contrast, we had limited success with staff members who had employment backgrounds that emphasized clinical services. Most but not all of the staff with such backgrounds had difficulty in dealing with necessarily flexible hours and places of work. They often had difficulty conceiving of the ingredients in community change or of help that was not delivered by professionals. They often were uncreative in identifying strategies and distrustful of volunteers working with families with serious problems (e.g., families in which a parent was incarcerated). Their emphasis remained on remediation of psychological traits, not on reform of settings to enable parents to be more involved in the community as both givers and receivers of informal assistance. Analogously, we contracted with a mental health center to provide family advocacy services to parents of 4-year-old children in kindergarten classes and a school district to provide a home visitation program that added broad family support and community engagement to a preexisting highly structured curriculum. Both organizations were sympathetic to Strong Communities and involved in the initiative from the beginning, but both struggled with adherence to its principles, a problem that we seldom encountered with volunteers. Because we look for an unusual set of skills in outreach staff, we used a two-pronged interview process in selecting outreach workers in the Greenville initiative. First, applicants were interviewed by a team usually consisting of a senior staff member, one or two outreach workers, and often a member of the community to be served by the new outreach worker. After this first interview, applicants generally interviewed individually with the initiative director and the immediate supervisor of the position. When the interviews were completed, the interviewers compared their observations about the qualifications of the applicant and his or her “fit” for the initiative. At the initial interview, applicants also were asked to respond in writing to an open-ended essay question. The applicants were typically presented with a least one complex community scenario and asked to explain how they would approach the situation in a page or less. Interviewers assessed the answers in relation to creativity, communication skills, and ability to respond to ambiguous situations. We were pleased by applicants who demonstrated the capacity to generate novel solutions, who appreciated the contributions of informal helpers and community leaders, and who understood the social factors in child maltreatment.

Preparing Outreach Workers In the Greenville initiative, the preparation of outreach workers after hiring consisted of a series of activities designed to orient them to the philosophy of the initiative, the 10 principles, the implementation process, and research documenting the factors related to child abuse and neglect. Early in the process, we began training of outreach workers by administering a self-assessment quiz. The quiz contained objective questions about facts about child abuse and neglect and subjective questions about the worker’s image of the child protection system. This technique enabled the trainers to identify and dispel misconceptions about the nature of child maltreatment and its causes and correlates. In addition to the more formal training sessions, new outreach workers accompanied experienced outreach workers on driving tours of the service area. These sessions gave new workers an opportunity to be introduced to individuals from organizations actively involved in the initiative and to learn about those organizations.

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Challenges: Past and Future It Keeps Getting Bigger, and That Means Better Strong Communities for Children is a distinctive and promising community-wide approach to prevention of child abuse and neglect. Success in the Greenville initiative in fostering community engagement and achieving positive changes in family life and community norms suggests that the approach may also be useful in achieving goals beyond improvement in child safety. However, Strong Communities is also a challenging intervention. Indeed, some of its most obvious strengths present problems for outreach workers and the organizations employing them. Notably, by its nature, Strong Communities keeps getting bigger. Each new connection multiplies as personal networks are linked into what we hope becomes an ever denser and increasingly inclusive web of relationships (in effect, a safety net for families) crisscrossing a caring community. Accordingly, even as volunteers in the community assume greater responsibility, the workload for successful outreach workers keeps increasing. This tendency is further increased by Principle 3. In an approach that conflicts with the predominant operational strategies in human services today, outreach workers are instructed that the emphasis is on starting new activities and settings. Care should be taken to be sure that the new projects within the initiative are logically consistent with its principles and goals (Principle 1) and that the process is undertaken in a manner that strengthens relationships (Principle 5) and capitalizes on community assets (Principle 10), among other principles. However, Principle 3 implies that more is better. As long as the activities are otherwise consistent with the Strong Communities principles, the more times and the more places that the initiative’s core messages are delivered or modeled, the better. The reason is that the frequency of presentation and the diversity of settings for communication of the core messages relate directly to the legitimization and reinforcement of the new norms that the initiative is intended to inculcate. Consider by analogy the enormous frequency of anti-smoking messages and the related diversity of regulatory and persuasive approaches that were required to instill a norm in the educated American public that tobacco use should be diligently avoided. In that regard, the desired changes in parental behavior and support for parents (in other words, the ingredients in safety for children) are far more complicated than those involved in prevention and cessation of smoking. Hence, the “full-court press” and the related “pushing on the envelope” (to mix metaphors) to Keep Kids Safe require an even more impressive array of communication strategies. This process implies that Strong Communities, already a relatively inexpensive intervention because of its focus on the whole community with just a few line staff, becomes steadily more efficient. In other words, the output per staff member keeps increasing. In that regard, outreach workers may become frustrated because their work is never finished. This experience may be intensified because the ultimate outcome (a reduction in child maltreatment) may be difficult to ascertain. The immediate task (e.g., organizing a family fun day) may also seem distant from the ultimate goal. We identified several strategies to address outreach workers’ concerns when they were feeling overwhelmed. The first may seem counterintuitive: plan a special event. A large community luncheon, for example, obviously creates many tasks for outreach workers to do themselves or to recruit volunteers to do. However, staff in the Greenville initiative generally found such events to be energizing, even when the event did not include their outreach area. Special events illustrated the level of community interest in Strong Communities, they brought new attention to Strong Communities’ work, and they resulted in enlistment of new, highly motivated volunteers. In short, special events reminded staff of the importance of the work that they were doing and generated new resources to make their job easier. Second, we took care to nominate outstanding outreach workers and volunteers—often successfully—for local, state, and national awards that brought attention to their hard work and its important consequences. Third, we set aside financial resources to enable high-achieving staff to have “perks” that reinforced the importance of what they continued to accomplish. Travel to conferences and local dinners with well-known guests not only provided a break at times when the task may have seemed daunting, but they also were intellectually stimulating and confirmed that well-known scholars and public officials justifiably found our staff’s efforts to be important not only in the immediate context but also for the field. Fourth, ample consultation was available from first-rate scholar-practitioners to clarify the centrality of particular strategies and to maximize the probability of success experiences. Fifth, perhaps the most powerful element in preventing burnout among staff whose work inevitably was constantly expanding was the shared sense of mission. Outreach workers and other Strong Communities not only regarded their goal as important, but they also believed. Drawing from their own families’ experience in overcoming adversity, their admiration of extraordinary volunteers, and deeply held religious faith or simply an exquisite moral compass, outreach workers passionately believed that the social transformation that we sought to achieve was both achievable and critical to their communities’—and their families’—quality of life. Strong Communities is not a job; it is a way of life. Accordingly, few staff could easily separate their paid work from the way that they and their families sought to live their lives. Hence, the enthusiasm and passion of co-workers were effective antidotes to discouragement that came from activities that seemed not to “click” or tasks that were incomplete.

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Going Against the Tide Strong Communities goes against prevailing trends in two ways. First, the intervention itself is designed to counter longstanding, powerful trends toward increased isolation, decreased social support, and decreased financial resources among young adults, including young parents (see e.g., Putnam, 2000). As a result, Strong Communities is designed to be culturechanging through new or revitalized norms of community engagement, mutual assistance, and family support. Second, in the contemporary Zeitgeist, “accountability” and “quality assurance”—and, at least implicitly, distrust of teachers, clinicians, and public employees in general—are obsessions of politicians, school administrators, human service managers, accreditation agencies, and many high-visibility academicians. In that context, the adoption of Strong Communities is a gutsy step for funders and community decision makers. In Strong Communities, the operational principles themselves and the organizational culture support innovation, not standardization. Fidelity is valued—but to principles, not techniques. Outreach workers are encouraged to follow the path of least resistance—to begin with the community sectors that they know best—and they are rewarded for their creativity in finding ways to expand the opportunities to spread Strong Communities’ message and to make young parents’ care for their own and their neighbors’ children easier. In that context, the initiative’s staff and volunteers are encouraged to focus on the big picture. When the penultimate goal is a culture change, the important questions are whether the message is being diffused in many ways and whether many opportunities are being created for neighbors’ assistance to one another. As Principle 1 implies, determination, as a matter of logic, of the compatibility of specific strategies with the initiative’s purposes is an ongoing task for both outreach staff and supervisors. However, an expectation of systematic empirical evaluation of each strategic intervention is a recipe for certain failure when a culture change is required and the number of projects underway accordingly number in the hundreds. Thus, Strong Communities is “evidence-based” in the sense that the operative principles are derived from research on the causes and correlates of child maltreatment and the conditions necessary for community change. It is also evidencebased in relation to the ultimate outcome (prevention of child maltreatment) and intermediate outcomes that are important moral and social goals in themselves. The pertinent evidence reflects both logic (accomplishment of community engagement is important for its own sake, not only for its hypothesized significance in achievement of improved child safety across a community) and empirical findings derived from well-designed quasi-experimental research. However, the power of Strong Communities comes from the passion of a shared sense of mission, the joy of creativity, the companionship and stimulation of bright, committed colleagues, and the sense of accomplishment that comes from enabling community residents to join in strengthening and protecting the relationships that they hold most dear. The Best Is Yet to Come The recommendations in this article must be tempered by the reality that they are derived from an initiative in a single metropolitan area, albeit one that covered diverse communities. The biggest need at this point in the evolution of Strong Communities is for replications in communities with different demographics, traditions, and resources. In that regard, the Greenville initiative was supported by a multi-million-dollar long-term grant. However, much of that funding went to costs for research and development, and a significant proportion went to contracts with partner agencies. The intervention itself is remarkably inexpensive, given its community-wide effects. The Greenville initiative was implemented by approximately one outreach worker per town, with service areas ranging from 5,000 to 50,000 people, with back-up by university-based consultants and two family resource center directors. Given varying levels of difficulty in community engagement, our impression is that the optimal arrangement is a workers-to-population ratio of approximately 1:10,000—approximately twice the staffing that was present in the Greenville initiative. However, we are now experimenting with other arrangements that may permit a less generous staffing level and that, as a result, may be more easily sustainable. For example, demonstration projects are now underway in Tel Aviv and Colorado Springs that rely on student volunteers to do much of the work of outreach workers. Another project is beginning in a section of Denver that relies on a base in primary health care. In that project, which is still in the planning stage, we hope to use family groups joining in well care of their children to form networks in the community. An outreach worker will assist in laying a foundation for informal assistance to families of young children in community organizations, while the worker also assists as needed in enabling social support for families receiving services in the host clinic. Strong Communities has four principal strengths that potentially allow its implementation in diverse communities, even diverse societies: 1. Strong Communities reflects empirical research on the circumstances in which child maltreatment occurs. 2. With its emphases on protection of family relationships and its stimulation of supportive relationships in the broader community, Strong Communities addresses matters close to the heart of people everywhere. In that regard, Strong Communities is grounded on a galvanizing, thoughtfully conceived moral foundation that is compatible with diverse religious traditions. 3. Because Strong Communities is focused on principles rather than techniques, it is flexible enough to match various customs, beliefs, and concerns in diverse communities (see Murphy-Berman et al., 2008) and even diverse societies.

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4. With its predominantly volunteer work force and its use of existing facilities, Strong Communities relies on the assets already present in the community. Accordingly, it is applicable in societies and communities that have few professional resources. Written from the perspective of international visitors and international participants in Strong Communities in Greenville, a forthcoming article will describe the potential applicability of Strong Communities in societies that diverge in politics, religion, wealth, and geography (i.e., Dominican Republic, Israel, Kosovo, New Zealand, Russia, and Uzbekistan). The key is sufficient freedom to allow communities to mobilize. In such contexts, like diverse U.S. communities (see McLeigh et al., 2015), the universal hopes and values embedded in the Golden Rule may provide the motivation for concerted action to keep kids safe through new norms of mutual assistance and both individual and collective responsibility to help parents in care for their own and their neighbors’ children. Thus, Strong Communities both creates and reforms settings to enable residents to be the attentive and caring people that they aspire to be. People shouldn’t have to ask! Acknowledgements The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of The Endowment’s trustees, staff, or advisors. This article and the special section of which it is a part were solicited by the prior Child Abuse & Neglect editor, David A. Wolfe. The approach described in this article is the product in substantial part of the extraordinary effort of scores of faculty, staff, and graduate students and thousands of volunteers. Their dedication, good will, and engagement in learning communities resulted in measurable differences across entire communities in the breadth and depth of engagement, the well-being of families, and the safety of their young children. Special thanks are owed to the initiative’s other faculty and staff leaders: Asher Ben-Arieh and James McDonell (research), Jill McLeigh (family activity centers), and Linda Smith (the host family resource center). References Anderson, D. (2014). The church and child protection: The Safe Families story. Child Abuse & Neglect, 38, 612–617. Berman, J. J., Murphy-Berman, V., & Melton, G. B. (2008). Strong Communities: What did participants actually do? Family and Community Health, 31, 126–135. Daro, D., & Benedetti, G. (2014). Sustaining progress in preventing child maltreatment: A transformative challenge. In J. E. Korbin, & R. D. Krugman (Eds.), Handbook of child maltreatment (pp. 281–300). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer. Dodge, K. A., & Coleman, D. L. (Eds.). (2009). Preventing child maltreatment: Community approaches. New York, NY: Guilford. Hashima, P. Y., & Melton, G. B. (2008). “I can conquer a mountain”: Ordinary people who provide extraordinary service in Strong Communities. Family and Community Health, 31, 162–172. Haski-Leventhal, D., Ben-Arieh, A., & Melton, G. B. (2008). Between neighborliness and volunteerism: The participants in the Strong Communities initiative. Family and Community Health, 31, 150–161. Haski-Leventhal, D., & McLeigh, J. D. (2009). Firefighters volunteering beyond their duty: An essential asset in rural communities. Journal of Rural Community Development, 4(2), 80–92. McDonell, J. R., Ben-Arieh, A., & Melton, G. B. (2015). Strong Communities for Children: Results of a multi-year community-based initiative to protect children from harm. Child Abuse & Neglect, 41, 79–96. McLeigh, J. D., McDonell, J. R., & Melton, G. B. (2015). 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