National Evaluation of the Title V Community Prevention Grants Program

• NCJ Number: 212214
• Date Published: August 2006
• Length: 241 pages
• Grant Number(s): OJP-99-C-007
• Agencies: OJJDP
• Publication Type: Program/Project Evaluation

Annotation

This report presents findings from a national evaluation of the Title V Community Prevention Grants Program (11 sites in 6 States), which provided funding and a guiding framework for developing and implementing comprehensive juvenile delinquency prevention plans.

Abstract

The evaluation found that some of the 11 communities funded under the Title V model struggled to understand and implement the model and some failed, while others understood how the model applied to their local circumstances and experienced the benefit of increased collaboration, reduced duplication in services, and more effective juvenile delinquency prevention programming. The evaluation provided the opportunity to identify the conditions under which communities could use the Title V model successfully and those under which they could not. To some extent, all of the communities implemented each of the four stages of the Title V model: a risk-focused and protection-focused approach, research-based planning, communitywide interventions, and local flexibility. The manner in which they implemented each stage, however, differed across communities. These differences could often be attributed to a community's previous exposure to comprehensive prevention planning. Some communities had difficulty in making programs simultaneously comprehensive, practical, and measurable for their effectiveness. Lessons learned from the evaluation are the necessity to broaden the definition of "success," the importance of starting small and building on successes, and the provision of ongoing training and technical assistance that helps communities understand and implement the program model under their distinctive conditions. In order to address research questions, the evaluation team developed a comprehensive, multimethod data collection plan for each community that examined program implementation over a 4-year period through quarterly reports and site visits at least twice a year. Reports are provided for the sites in each of the six States. 4 references