Sustainability
Along with cultural competence, sustainability is an integral part of the entire SPF process. Sustainability is the ability of a prevention strategy to carry on into the foreseeable future. Often times prevention efforts come and go at the mercy of grant cycles. The SPF process was designed to avoid this kind of short-lived prevention strategy and thus, focuses heavily on building strategies that become sustainable parts of a community's future.
Building sustainable prevention strategies involves building long-lasting prevention infrastructure, skills, and capacity. In order to do this, community-wide collaboration is often necessary as sharing resources and knowledge across many organizations and sectors creates the kind of infrastructure that can withstand the changes that may occur in any one of its many interrelated working parts. The SPF process has built this priority for sustainability into the prevention approach by focusing on capacity building, collaboration, and evaluation. Using these powerful tools, communities can identify the prevention efforts that are obtaining the best results (evaluation); continue to develop and build on their prevention knowledge and resources (capacity building); and share these resources across sectors (collaboration).
Tools
References
- Altman, D.G. (1995). Sustaining interventions in community systems: On the relationship between researchers and communities. Health Psychology, 14(6), 526-536.
- SAMHSA. (2019, June 20). A Guide to SAMSHA’s Strategic Prevention Framework. Retrieved from https://www.samhsa.gov/sites/default/files/20190620-samhsa-strategic-prevention-framework-guide.pdf