Building the Capacity of Youth and Families through University-Community Collaborations

Abstract

Millions of ournation 's youth are at riskfor involvement in crime and violence, substance use and abuse, unsafe sex, school failure, lack of job preparedness, and the problems associated with living in poverty. To address these issues, scholars and child advocates have called for comprehensive, integrated, and community-based responses that build community capacities for sustaining effective programs. Based on a model for university-community collaboration in the evaluation of youth-serving programs, the Development-In-Context Evaluation (DICE) model, a means is presented to promote such community empowerment. Building on the work of Weiss and her colleagues, the DICE model involves a community-collaborative approach to evaluation, and to program design and implementation. The approach builds on the values of the community, engages community members in issues identification, in evaluation design, implementation, data collection, and in decisions about how to use the results of the evaluation.