| Sustainability Defined | Sustainability and the Prevention Planning Process | Taft Middle School Prevention Plan | Why Sustainability Is Important |

Planning for sustainability should begin early in your prevention planning process, and should be continued throughout. For example, you should consider sustainability when doing the following:

• Making school and community connections. The support you need to sustain your program over time is the same support you will need to complete a successful school and community assessment, develop an effective prevention plan, select appropriate prevention strategies and programs, and implement them well. According to the Center for Mental Health in Schools (2001), the most important way to promote sustainability is to build ";a cadre of stakeholders who are motivationally ready and able to proceed."; (For more information on building school and community support, see Promoting Prevention Through School-Community Partnerships.)

• Selecting programs. Make sure that the research-based strategies and programs you select for your prevention initiative meet identified needs (see Using Existing Data in Your Needs Assessment), are supported by school and community partners, and are well-suited to the resources at your disposal. Resources such as "personnel capacities, materials required, total costs, space needs, school or agency goals, the goodness of fit of a program, and time requirements for implementation . . . can become barriers to adoption and permanence if not adequately addressed in the early stages [of prevention planning]" (Swisher, 2000). (For more information, see Identifying Prevention Priorities and Strategies for Success and Selecting Research-Based Programs for Your School.)

• Implementing programs. Factors related to successful program implementation (see Implementing Research-Based Prevention Programs) can influence sustainability in two ways. First, it is unlikely that a school that lacks the capacity to implement a prevention program fully will have the capacity to sustain it once the initial funding ends. Second, programs that are poorly implemented are unlikely to produce positive youth outcomes and should therefore not be sustained. Keep in mind, however, that many programs that are poorly implemented have the potential to produce positive outcomes. This is why it is important to maintain prevention activities long enough to refine them as needed, so that you can assess their true impact. Otherwise, you will never know which components of your prevention initiative to sustain.

References

Center for Mental Health in Schools. (2001). Sustaining school-community partnerships to enhance outcomes for children and youth: A guidebook and tool kit. Los Angeles, CA: Author at UCLA. Available online at http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/pdfdocs/SustainingGuide/sustainguide.pdf.

Swisher, J. D. (2000). Sustainability of prevention. Addictive Behaviors, 25 (6), 965-973.