Preventing and Mitigating the Effects of ACEs by Building Community Capacity and Resilience: APPI Cross-Site Evaluation Findings. Executive Summary.

This executive summary highlights the findings of a study that evaluated five community-based initiatives in Washington State intended to prevent child maltreatment and exposure to toxic stress, mitigate their effects, and improve a wide array of child and youth development outcomes. The evaluation was conducted in two phases. During the first phase (2013–2014), the evaluation team assessed the contexts in which the sites were operating, the strategies the sites used to increase their collective community capacity to address adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and the impact of their collective efforts at the county level. During the second phase of the evaluation (2015–2016), the evaluation team assessed the extent to which the sites developed sufficient capacity to achieve their goals and examined the relationship of select sites’ efforts to ACEs-related outcomes at the subcounty level. For the study, a survey was conducted to assess the sites’ collective community capacity, site documents were reviewed, key stakeholders were interviewed, and quantitative analyses were conducted of individual-, program-, and organization-level changes associated with 11 select activities. The evaluation of APPI sites’ collective community capacity had three major findings: the development of APPI sites across community capacity domains varies; the sites have similar capacity on five domains, including community partnerships, shared goals, focus on equity, leadership and infrastructure, and multi-level strategies; and the sites have different capacity on five domains and network structure and characteristics, including their capacity to engage with and empower a diverse set of community partners, communicate effectively with network members and community partners, manage community problem-solving processes, collect and use data to monitor and evaluate their work, and expand the reach and scale of their activities. Policy implications are discussed. 1 table, 1 figure, and 31 references.