Website Connects Government Agencies, Community Organizations with Proven Cost-Effective Programs

Schools, gov­ern­ment agen­cies and com­mu­ni­ty-based orga­ni­za­tions have a new tool to help them iden­ti­fy and fund sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly proven pro­grams with a track record of pro­mot­ing children’s health and devel­op­ment. Blue­prints for Healthy Youth Devel­op­ment, a new inter­ac­tive web­site being unveiled today, makes it easy to select cost-effec­tive pro­grams that help chil­dren reach their full potential.

“Blue­prints for Healthy Youth Devel­op­ment builds on decades of research about what works to help chil­dren reach impor­tant devel­op­men­tal mile­stones,” said Del­bert Elliott, Blue­prints founder and found­ing direc­tor of the Cen­ter for the Study and Pre­ven­tion of Vio­lence at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Col­orado Boul­der. ​“We used to focus pri­mar­i­ly on pro­grams that pre­vent­ed or reduced juve­nile delin­quen­cy, but research shows that we need to look at the full range of approach­es to improve out­comes for young people.”

Blue­prints also pro­vides crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion about the staff, train­ing and finan­cial resources orga­ni­za­tions often need to include when apply­ing for fed­er­al and state grants, devel­op­ing school improve­ment plans or seek­ing fund­ing for com­mu­ni­ty initiatives.

For the last few years, Blue­prints has worked with the Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion and oth­er part­ners to expand its data­base of mod­el and promis­ing pro­grams that pro­mote pos­i­tive behav­ior and rela­tion­ships, edu­ca­tion, emo­tion­al well-being and phys­i­cal health of chil­dren and youth. Easy-to-use search fea­tures allow users to iden­ti­fy pro­grams by out­come, the pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive influ­ences that pre­dict those out­comes, pop­u­la­tion or pro­gram type.

The Foun­da­tion plans to use Blue­prints as part of our new ini­tia­tive Evidence2Success, a new mod­el aimed at increas­ing pub­lic invest­ment in proven pro­grams that pro­mote children’s health and devel­op­ment. The first Evidence2Success site, in Prov­i­dence, RI, will use Blue­prints lat­er this year.

“Today’s lead­ers are seek­ing pro­grams that are ground­ed in sol­id evi­dence that shows they have a pos­i­tive impact on children’s lives,” said Patrick McCarthy, pres­i­dent and CEO of the Casey Foun­da­tion. ​“Blue­prints gives lead­ers easy access to valu­able infor­ma­tion they can use to make crit­i­cal deci­sions about which pro­grams offer the great­est like­li­hood of cre­at­ing a path to suc­cess for our nation’s young people.”

Each Blue­prints pro­gram has been reviewed by Blue­prints staff and an exter­nal advi­so­ry board of pre­ven­tion experts that exam­ine the evi­dence for each pro­gram. Blue­prints for Healthy Youth Devel­op­ment is devel­oped and man­aged by the CU-Boul­der Cen­ter for the Study and Pre­ven­tion of Vio­lence in the Insti­tute of Behav­ioral Sci­ence in part­ner­ship with the Dart­ing­ton Social Research Unit in the Unit­ed King­dom, and fund­ed by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.