Mobilizing Communities to Implement Evidence‐Based Practices for Youth Violence Prevention Introduction to the Special Issue

Over the last few decades there has been an increasing focus on the importance of scientific evidence for driving policy and practice in human services, including the field of youth violence prevention. At the same time, there has been a shift in the process of disseminating this evidence, including a greater emphasis on scientist-practitioner collaborations and community mobilization, the focus of this special issue. An overarching theme is the importance of translational research, as seen across multiple disciplines including medicine (Insel 2005), social psychology (Tashiro and Mortensen 2006), developmental psychopathology (Cicchetti and Toth 2006), and others. Translational research combines both basic laboratory studies and applied research with a common focus on the ‘‘end use’’ of findings to improve people’s lives (Guerra et al. in press). A major thrust of this work has been to encourage both high-quality efficacy trials of model programs or practices (Type I translation) as well as large-scale effectiveness trials under real-world conditions (Type II translation). Still, demonstrating that a practice can be implemented effectively with positive outcomes beyond the original sample does not address the larger issue of how it should be disseminated even more broadly, including whether it is a good fit for a specific context, and how it can best be implemented. Also, while program fidelity is essential, another significant challenge is that adaptations are the rule rather than the exception—under uncontrolled field conditions, scaled-up and disseminated programs often look different than the model they are replicating, in some cases because they are responding to real-world circumstances that require some changes from the original model. Finding the balance between program fidelity and adaptation is an ongoing challenge of taking evidencebased practices to scale (Backer 2005). Fortunately, there is an emerging base of both science and experience to guide translation and implementation of evidence-based practices in order to help communities optimize their utilization of scientific findings (Fixsen et al. 2011). A primary means of accomplishing this goal is community mobilization, defined as structured activities that bring organizations and residents together towards a common goal. There has been much recent interest in developing carefully articulated models of community mobilization involving science-practitioner partnerships (e.g., Wandersman et al. 2005), as well as organized infrastructures to achieve these goals. In the field of youth violence prevention, the Academic Centers of Excellence program (ACE), established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2000, is an example of a largescale effort to establish university-community partnerships across the U.S. focused on moving from science to practice. Backer and Guerra (2011) discuss more fully the overall relationship of community mobilization to evidence-based practices (EBPs). The goal of this special issue was to bring together lessons learned over the past decade from the ACEs and some related efforts for working with communities to select, implement, evaluate, and sustain youth violence prevention EBPs. As Vivolo et al. (2011) note, a primary focus of these centers is to bring together groups of scientists who collaborate with community leaders on implementation of youth violence prevention EBPs. Because the intent of this special issue was to highlight this N. G. Guerra (&) University of California Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA e-mail: nancy.guerra@ucr.edu