About Us

Who We Are
Our Values
The Empirical Foundation
The Components of Strong Communities
The Evaluation
Where We Are

Who We Are
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The product of a generous long-term grant (currently $1.65M/yr) from The Duke Endowment to the Clemson University (CU) Research Foundation, STRONG COMMUNITIES for Children is a groundbreaking initiative to engage all sectors of the community in prevention of child abuse and neglect. STRONG COMMUNITIES is extraordinary in the scope of its application, the nature of its strategies, and the depth of its evaluation.

The initiative has brought together more than 4,500 volunteers and hundreds of organizations in a relatively small area of the Upstate region of South Carolina. STRONG COMMUNITIES differs from many community initiatives to enhance the safety and well-being of children in that the principal participants come not from social service agencies but instead from primary community institutions (e.g., apartment complexes, other businesses, churches and synagogues, civic clubs, parent organizations, fire departments, police departments, municipal governments, primary health care, and schools).

In implementing this initiative, STRONG COMMUNITIES draws on the intellectual resources of the CU Institute on Family and Neighborhood Life (IFNL). The resulting plan reflects IFNL's emphasis on the use of primary community institutions to facilitate connections between families and communities. As descriptions of IFNL have noted since its creation, "work at IFNL starts from the premises that strong communities support strong families and vice versa, and that both are necessary for healthy development of children and youth."

STRONG COMMUNITIES is led by Gary B. Melton, director of IFNL. Prof. Melton was vice-chair of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect and chair of the Board's working group in the early 1990s that designed a proposed new national strategy for child protection. He was the lead author of the Board's 1993 report – Neighbors Helping Neighbors: A New National Strategy for the Protection of Children – that provided the blueprint for a new neighborhood-based child protection system. Subsequently, Prof. Melton co-edited two books that further explicated the strategy and the foundation for such ideas in empirical research:

For this work and related contributions culminating in STRONG COMMUNITIES (the first large-scale demonstration of the Board's proposed strategy), Prof. Melton has received distinguished contribution awards from the American Professional Society on Abuse of Children, the South Carolina Professional Society on Abuse of Children (SCPSAC), Prevent Child Abuse America, and the American Psychological Association.

The associate director of STRONG COMMUNITIES, Robin J. Kimbrough-Melton, is director of IFNL's National Center for Rural Justice and Crime Prevention. A founder of the National Association of Drug Court Professionals, Prof. Kimbrough-Melton has extensive experience in community development, particularly in relation to use of the legal system to strengthen family support and to enhance sense of community. She has been a staff member of the Maryland and Nebraska legislatures, the American Bar Association, and the American Public Human Services Association. She has received the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Child Advocacy from the American Psychological Association Division of Child, Youth, and Family Services and the Professional Service Award from SCPSAC. Prof. Kimbrough-Melton oversees the community outreach components of STRONG COMMUNITIES.

The coordinators of the research emanating from STRONG COMMUNITIES are James R. McDonell and Asher Ben-Arieh. Among numerous field evaluations, Prof. McDonell led the design and evaluation of Project Pathways, a successful federally-funded program to assist pregnant and parenting teens in several counties in South Carolina's Pee Dee and Grand Strand regions. Prof. Ben-Arieh, who splits his time between Clemson and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is internationally recognized as an authority on indicators of child well-being. Profs. McDonell and Ben-Arieh have each received SCPSAC's Research Award.

Dottie Campbell, an employee of the Center for Community Services, directs STRONG FAMILIES, the system of person-to-person mutual assistance for young families in STRONG COMMUNITIES. Through previous positions in state agencies, universities, and nonprofit organizations, Ms. Campbell has extensive experience in the development and administration of innovative programs for support to families of young children.

The local project coordinator supervising day-to-day operations of STRONG COMMUNITIES is Linda A. Smith, an Extension associate for IFNL who directs the Center for Community Services. Under auspices of state agencies and universities and now of a nonprofit university-related family resource center, Ms. Smith has been remarkably successful in administering one of the initial implementations of several interventions that are now widely adopted: multisystemic treatment, school-based mental health services, and neighborhood resource centers.

The other faculty and staff who are assigned primarily to STRONG COMMUNITIES include five doctoral-level research assistant professors and numerous other Extension and research associates, most of them with master's degrees. Two of the other faculty and staff (Paulette Grate and Lucinda Quick) have received SCPSAC's Community Service Award. For a full list of the faculty and staff with contact information, click here.

The faculty and staff who lead the STRONG COMMUNITIES initiative are aided by a distinguished panel of advisors: Andrew Billingsley of the University of South Carolina, Scott Henggeler of the Medical University of South Carolina, Jill Korbin of Case Western Reserve University, Richard Krugman of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, and David Wolfe of the University of Toronto. Dr. Krugman, the dean of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, chairs the group. In addition, Deborah Daro of the Chapin Hall Center for Children, a unit of the University of Chicago, serves as consultant to The Duke Endowment and participates in the evaluation of the initiative.

Our Values
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STRONG COMMUNITIES is a comprehensive effort to prevent child maltreatment by building systems of support for families of young children. Our vision is for every child and every parent to be confident that someone will notice and someone will care whenever they have cause for joy, sorrow, or worry. STRONG COMMUNITIES rests, therefore, on a collective commitment to enhance a sense of community in which individuals (in the lingo of international human rights, personalities), whatever their age, are given due respect as persons and thereby are guaranteed personal security. In effect, the initiative is designed to give new strength to the application of the Golden Rule in participating communities as they care for their youngest members.

Thus, STRONG COMMUNITIES is grounded in traditional values. Our work reflects the importance of caring friends, relatives, and co-workers in the lives of people regardless of their social background. Fundamentally, STRONG COMMUNITIES is about relationships—protection and promotion of the family and community relationships that form the basis of our personal identities (even our names) and that ordinarily shelter and nurture us.

At the same time, we recognize that far too many children lack adequate care and attention and that some are subjected to egregious physical or sexual assaults. Moreover, we embrace the community's collective responsibility to ensure the safety of dependent children – a responsibility that typically is most effectively fulfilled by provision of sufficient social and material support to parents to enable them to care for children with confidence in neighborhoods where families feel a sense of community. No child should go to bed hungry for either food or love, and no child should grow up in fear. No parent should feel alone or impotent in attempting to provide the goods, both tangible and intangible, that are necessary to a child's security, both physical and psychological.

The Empirical Foundation
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Our moral commitment is matched by our understanding of the critical ingredients in safety for children. As the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect recognized, if child protection is to be effective, then it must become a part of everyday life in the neighborhoods where children live, study, and play. For children to be safe and families to be strong, they must be able to count on others' noticing family needs and reaching out to help. As the Board summarized, children are safe when they live in neighborhoods characterized by "friendship among neighbors, watchfulness for each others' families, physical safety, common knowledge of community resources, visible leadership, and a sense of belonging, ownership, and collective responsibility." In short, children's safety requires the establishment of a norm of mutual assistance for all families so that the children most at risk are protected.

When such a norm is actualized, neighbors do watch and support each other's families. However, such conditions occur only when neighbors and their leaders understand that they can make a difference. Neighborhood quality (independent of social class) is thus directly related to the safety of children in their homes. Care for children is more difficult and the social and material resources to assist in coping with such challenges are scarcer when the environment is dangerous. Parents who perceive that they and their neighbors are unable to meet their responsibilities also are more prone to lash out in frustration or simply to lack the energy to provide their children with adequate care and supervision.

Unfortunately, support for young parents is a scarce commodity today. Our own survey data suggest that approximately one-fifth of parents of young children are highly isolated – uninvolved in attending community activities, helping neighbors, or being helped by them, unable to identify sources of emergency child care, and unfamiliar with children in the neighborhood other than their own. In some measure, such lack of support often reflects parents' own disconnection from community institutions. Although research indicates that there has been a substantial decrease in community crime and sexual exploitation in recent years, a generation-long trend toward markedly increasing alienation, isolation, and distrust, especially among young people (including young adults), persists.

This lack of community engagement is exacerbated, however, by the growing tendency of the public as a whole to view children as troubled and out of control – conditions that the public further attributes to parents' ineptitude or lack of caring. Such a public perception is likely, unfortunately, to validate the low parental self-esteem that is a common dynamic in child abuse and neglect. In part, the lack of support thus may reflect devaluing of parents in the community.

More generally, our society is now organized so that there are fewer opportunities for people "naturally" to notice when their neighbors need help. Parents almost uniformly feel harried, the time spent in commuting continues to increase, the norms sustaining informal social gatherings are ever weaker, and families retreat behind subdivision walls onto backyard decks or, more commonly, into dens or home theaters in front of the television set. With fewer adults in the household and increasing geographic distance from extended families, parents often feel alone in meeting the challenges of child rearing.

Such trends are especially pernicious among families of young children. To state the matter positively, social capital has especially strong impact on the well-being of young children. In part, this phenomenon is the product of the vulnerability of young children and the amount of care that they require. It also reflects the limitations in resources that young parents are especially likely to have. Real income has been declining for young adults, while debt load and job instability have been increasing. As already implied, generational effects also mean that social resources are weaker for each cohort of new parents.

STRONG COMMUNITIES thus focuses its work on families of young children in part because they are the most likely to lack adequate social and economic resources for child rearing. (Note that this conclusion is population-based; it is not focused simply on the young parents who are easily identified as high-need.) Moreover, a lack of parental energy – or, in the extreme, uncontrolled parental anger – has the most detrimental effect on children too small to care for themselves or to be able in some measure to avoid dangerous situations in the home. As a result, the prevalence of maltreatment is highest among young children, and the risk of serious harm from maltreatment is also greatest.

At the same time, looking positively, early childhood offers natural opportunities to build a system of support for families. Connections in the community can grow into sustainable reciprocal help. Moreover, because of the need that they experience, young parents may be especially open to assistance.

The Components of STRONG COMMUNITIES
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Although STRONG COMMUNITIES is based in historic values reflecting the importance of care and respect for one another, the need to express such values in an era of increasing alienation and isolation implies that it is ultimately an initiative about change. It's about changing the way people think about child abuse and neglect. It's about changing people's understanding of this issue so that they will take personal responsibility for protecting all children in their community. It's about changing relationships so that people feel more connected and willing to watch out for each other. And it's about changing and strengthening communities and the institutions within them – the schools, the places of worship, the health clinics, the workplaces – to make it easier for all families with young children to rear their children. Indeed, in an era in which each cohort of young adults is less engaged in – or supported by – the community than the age-group that came before, STRONG COMMUNITIES seeks transformation of the norms of social interaction and community responsibility for the well-being of young children and their families.

In the broadest terms, there are two components in STRONG COMMUNITIES: community development and direct assistance to families of young children. In the former instance, community outreach workers – approximately one per community – are the catalysts for STRONG COMMUNITIES overall. Starting with community (e.g., Mauldin) and topical (e.g., Economic Security) working groups in the first year of the initiative, outreach staff began organizing community leaders to identify steps that could be taken to build connections in order to strengthen support for families. (Click here to hear excerpts from remarks made at the kickoff event in spring 2002.) These networks go well beyond the usual actors in child protection to include city council members, clergy, religious lay leaders, fire fighters, apartment managers, real estate agents, small business owners, bankers, civic club members, educators, community police officers, etc. For the most part, STRONG COMMUNITIES draws on a cross-section of the community. It is noteworthy, for example, that almost half of STRONG COMMUNITIES' volunteers are male – a rarity in initiatives for children. In communities with few primary institutions in which to work, outreach staff have helped to create neighborhood associations and other organizations to serve as outlets for community action to support young families.

Community leaders themselves help to recruit volunteers to spread the word about the importance of neighbors' watching out for each other. Special events, such as community festivals and block parties, are often the venues for such action.

Particular themes may also serve as the vehicles for generation of interest and community service. For example, a campaign for prevention of shaken baby syndrome provided opportunities for diverse audiences to hear two messages. First, parents who do bad things to children usually are not evil people; they are instead overwhelmed people trying to cope by themselves with a crying baby. It was easy to galvanize church and business groups, for example, when they could empathize with a parent dealing with a stressful situation alone and when they could then begin to think about ways in their own contexts to minimize the likelihood of such a challenge. Second, the preponderance of male offenders in shaken baby syndrome cases provided an opportunity to focus on fathers (unlike many such prevention campaigns, which tend to emphasize the diffusion of information among new mothers). Some creative means (e.g., 3-on-3 basketball tournaments; pretrial diversion classes) were used to reach young men with this message.

STRONG COMMUNITIES has also striven to ensure the availability of someone to watch out for every family of a child under 6 in the service area. At this writing (March 2006), we are expanding this direct assistance under the rubric, STRONG FAMILIES. Health care providers, real estate agents, apartment managers, church congregations, specialty business managers (e.g., children's clothing stores), teachers, and others are being asked to help identify families of young children. They are being offered volunteer Family Friends. In cases of greater or more specialized need, the family may be offered the help of a professional family advocate.

The community organizations are also contributing their facilities and human resources in the development of Family Activity Centers. Although we expect that it will take 2 or 3 years to cover the service area with all of the services, we hope that all of the FACs will ultimately regularly offer at least the following: Drop In and Play, Parents' Night Out, parent-child activities, primary human services (i.e., general casework), and financial education and mentoring. The generic social services-essentially, being available in the community on a regular basis to respond to whatever problems young families may have-will be offered by a pool of professionals whose time is contributed by their agencies.

The Center for Pediatric Medicine at the Greenville Hospital System University Medical Center is collaborating in the development of EXTRA CARE for Caring Families. EXTRA CARE provides an opportunity for the addition of family support activities during the "off" months of ordinary well child care during a baby's first year. Some components of EXTRA CARE are also being applied in community pediatrics and family medicine practices.

Through Family Partnerships, family advocates employed by the Piedmont Center for Mental Health Services are providing support to parents of children in public kindergarten classes. They also are helping to build parent leadership and engagement in the community.

Overall, STRONG COMMUNITIES is distinguished by (a) its focus on building social capital as the principal strategy in prevention of child maltreatment, (b) its emphasis on primary prevention, (c) its universality (relevance to all young families), (d) its incorporation of the assets found in primary community institutions, including some that usually are not directly involved in child protection), (e) its status as a goal-directed initiative rather than a collection of programs or strategies, (f) its extensive program of evaluation research, and (g) its base in communities that are diverse in ethnicity, social class, growth rate, and population density.

The Evaluation
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STRONG COMMUNITIES has an extensive program of both process and outcome evaluation. Most of the studies are conducted by a team led by Profs. Ben-Arieh and McDonell.

There is also a triennial community survey of parents of preschool and elementary-school-age children. This survey includes matched comparisons of a random sample of families in the STRONG COMMUNITIES area with those in matched communities in the Midlands section of South Carolina (Lexington, Newberry, and Richland). The survey was designed with input by researchers at a parallel project (also funded by The Duke Endowment) as well as the STRONG COMMUNITIES team. It is supervised by Deborah Daro and administered by Westat.

For an overview of the evaluation plan, click here.

Where We Are
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The Golden Strip communities along I-385 south of I-85 are rapidly growing and predominantly affluent, although there are pockets of poverty or near-poverty in both Mauldin and Simpsonville and the demographics of Fountain Inn, the southernmost town in the Golden Strip, are similar to the less advantaged rural area to the west. There is also a rapidly growing Hispanic minority in Mauldin and Simpsonville. In the northwestern area of the service area are some of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in metropolitan Greenville, several of which are "islands" separated from other communities by the Donaldson Industrial Park, a former air base. Most of those neighborhoods are majority African American. Along the Saluda River in the west of the service area are several former mill towns. The southern half of the service area is very rural with just a few small villages (e.g., Fork Shoals) that are easily identified.

Serving southern Greenville County and the nearby communities in Anderson and Laurens counties in South Carolina's Upstate, STRONG COMMUNITIES is based at two family resource centers: The Center for Community Services in Simpsonville and The Riley Center in the U.S. 25 corridor (Pelzer), both in southern Greenville County. A large network of Family Activity Centers using existing community buildings-mostly churches, fire stations, and schools-as bases is now being developed across the service area.

The service area consists of urban, suburban, rural, and small-town communities of diverse social class and ethnicity. The five outreach areas in the service area as a whole vary in median income (2000 Census data) from $31,036 to $56,485, in poverty from 4% to 17%, in population density from 194.3 to 1080.7 persons per square mile, and in ethnicity from about one-third to about 90% White.

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