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Components of a Comprehensive Prevention Program:
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Advancing HIV Prevention Initiative:
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Evidence-Based Interventions:
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Introduction to Storytelling as a Prevention Strategy:
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Selecting an Evidence-Based Intervention for Your Community
The most important part of carrying out an evidence-based intervention is the selection process. Your organization can save a lot of time, money, and headaches by choosing an intervention that best fits the needs of your focus population, community, and agency. Before even examining the interventions that are available, there are two important steps that you must take: 1) conduct a community assessment, and 2) conduct an agency readiness self-assessment.
A community assessment taps into the true experts: the members of that community. An assessment uses a variety of methods to respectfully gather information and opinions from as many members of the community as possible. The assessment should provide you with a clear picture of community values and attitudes, target population, risk behavior(s), risk co-factors, and the context in which these occur. Most importantly, the assessment should tell you what is influencing people to make decisions around their risk-taking behaviors (or, “behavioral determinants”). NNAAPC developed a brief Community Assessment Tool that can serve as a template. For assistance and any questions you may have, please contact NNAAPC at information@nnaapc.org.
An agency readiness self-assessment seeks to gauge an organization’s capacity to create, carry out, and/or sustain intervention efforts. Different interventions require different resources for achievement, and an agency needs to have a good idea of what those are. Some interventions require more financial resources, while others may rely heavily upon a healthy volunteer base. You can use the Agency Readiness Self Assessment tools published for each specific DEBI intervention, found on www.effectiveinterventions.org, or NNAAPC has developed a more general Agency Readiness Self-Assessment Tool.
Once you take these steps, an agency can select an intervention that best fits its community. Examining the relationships between intervention activities, behavioral determinants, and the intended outcome(s) of the intervention (which are spelled out in an intervention’s logic model) will guide the decision-making process. An intervention is a good match when the determinants and intended outcomes of an intervention are the same as those presented in the community and desired by the agency. Activities of the intervention can then be tailored to match the target population, resources of the agency, and your community.
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