30 Communities of Practice
Questions and Answers

The purpose and focus of the project:
The purpose of the project is threefold: 1) to offer an extended learning opportunity for community coalitions to enhance their skills in action planning and evaluation, 2) to help the Institute better understand how to teach and guide community coalitions in the process of tracking community-level indicators, and 3) to assess the effectiveness of a distance learning, Web-based format. We want to learn and capture what works well for our participants and how to better teach others this process.

Participants will engage in sessions to:

Our Instructor:
We are very pleased to have contracted with Dr. Vince Francisco from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro. Dr. Francisco is a premier researcher on community systems changes. The sessions have been developed from his extensive work with coalitions.

What is expected from the participants?
This is an action research project of the Institute. We will be collecting data from the participants in the form of interviews, surveys and entering data into an online documentation system (ODS), a Web-based software system that allows coalitions to enter and track community changes in programs, policies and practices. The system has a unique graphing feature that displays community changes against population level data (ex: student survey, alcohol related car crashes). Data entry takes 3 to 5 hours a month. The benefit is an analysis of coalition contribution toward population level outcomes.

We ask for a commitment from the coalitions to form learning teams of three and attend the Web-based sessions. There will monthly sessions of 1.5 hours per session (Oct. and Nov. will have two sessions). The sessions are taped and available online for participants who want to review a session or view a missed session. Participants will sign a confidentiality form (Informed Consent for Participation) from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

What is Action Research?
Briefly stated, action research is a method of inquiry to gathering information from various sources to improve our efforts. Action research is intended to make a positive difference in the lives to people as opposed to just answering a research question. Action research is very different from what many people think of when they hear the word research. One does not need to form a hypothesis or designate a control group to study subjects. Action research asks questions such as, “What are we doing right?”, “What can we improve?”, “How can we make things better?” The community coalition prevention field is prime for research on how to build capacity for more effective practice locally, and increasing systems changes related to population-level outcomes. Our action research project seeks to understand how to better engage and support the coalition by involving our participants as partners in our process of inquiry and discovery.

Project timeline:
We believe that one factor for success of the project is to engage participants over time. The project will begin in September 2007 and end in May 2008.

Requirements for applying: Selection
Coalitions will be randomly selected. This is important because there are gaps in our understanding of how coalitions achieve and document community change. So the CADCA Institute is testing a system that holds promise for the field. Random selection creates an unbiased group of participants that are reflective of the overall coalition field. This way, we can understand the usefulness of the system to serve the vast needs of diverse coalitions.

For more information, contact:
Dr. Diane Galloway at 800-542-2322, ext. 245, or dgalloway@cadca.org
Evelyn Yang at 800-542-2322, ext. 243, or eyang@cadca.org