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Brief No. 1, January 3, 2006
In 1993, the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect called on "all American adults to resolve to be good neighbors to know, watch, and support their neighbors’ children and to offer help when needed to their neighbors’ families." The underlying idea was that child protection should be part of everyday life so that child rearing is not unnecessarily difficult and, therefore, that parents do not become frustrated that they withdraw or lash out. Applying this vision, Strong Communities, a comprehensive initiative to prevent child abuse and neglect, provides communities with an easily understood and readily accepted behavioral goal: the assurance that every child and every parent know that when they have reason to celebrate, worry, or grieve, someone will notice, and someone will care.
That such relationships often do not emerge “naturally” suggests both the importance and the difficulty in achieving such a goal, especially in communities that have been drained. Further, some suspect that an explicit focus on child safety may diminish the interest of highly adaptive parents and potential volunteers and that it may also deter the participation of families and communities in which there is great risk. Given this combination of concerns, some wonder about the feasibility of a truly community-based strategy for prevention of harm to children. At its most basic, Strong Communities provides such a test.
In that regard, the "market penetration" that Strong Communities has achieved in its first 3.5 years is impressive. During that time, more than 3,500 individuals – a number that is surely an underestimate – have volunteered their time and talents. (To give a context, there were approximately 91,375 adults in the service area in 2000, according to the U.S. Census.) Moreover, the number of volunteers has steadily grown as the initiative has matured.
This rapid growth in volunteer involvement has been paralleled – in a sense, preceded – by the participation of community organizations. The engagement of primary community institutions – health clinics, public safety agencies, schools, and places of worship – is an intermediate outcome of interest to Strong Communities, because such participation signifies the investment of social capital (the “wealth” that communities have in relationships). Further, such engagement forms the foundation for social support for families.
Thus, in the first months of Strong Communities, outreach staff spent much of their time educating leaders of community organizations about the initiative. Subsequently, primary community institutions have been encouraged and assisted to expand the ways that they facilitate connections among and with young families. In communities where primary community institutions (e.g., civic organizations) have been absent or weak, outreach workers have stimulated their organization and development.
In its first several years, the Strong Communities initiative has demonstrated that it is possible to mobilize communities to keep kids safe. The question remains, however, whether this involvement is more than superficial head-nodding to an undebatable premise. In other words, is the “mobilization” in fact mere lip service, whether by volunteers or organization leaders, or does the agreement to participate in Strong Communities signal a commitment to significant and sustained involvement? This question will be addressed in the next Research Brief.
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Published semi-monthly in 2006, Strong Communities Research Briefs is edited by Gary Melton with assistance by Jill McLeigh (data analysis), Erica Mabry (graphics), and Kerry Coffey (layout). The research described herein was conducted by Asher Ben-Arieh, Dr. Melton, Ms. McLeigh, Ms. Mabry, and James McDonell with generous support by The Duke Endowment. Strong Communities for Children is a Public Service Activity of Clemson University. For more information, visit www.clemson.edu/strongcommunities.
For the purpose of this research, as we use the term volunteer as a synonym with contributor or participant. Mere attendance at a meeting or workshop at which Strong Communities is the topic of discussion is not enough to be counted as volunteer activity.
The grant for Strong Communities was initially awarded to the Clemson University Research Foundation in January 2002, and the initiative was publicly launched in March 2002. A case-based volunteer data system was launched in January 2004. Until then, 799 individuals (unduplicated county) and 828 unidentified individuals (mostly people who had volunteered to participate in group activities) had been recorded as contributing time to Strong Communities. Hence, the January 2004 number depicted in the first figure must be reduced by a probably small but unknown number in order to obtain an accurate number of known participants. Because, however, much activity that is an outgrowth of Strong Communities is conducted without the participation of an outreach worker or a volunteer leader, even such an expanded number is surely an underestimate of the true prevalence of volunteer activity within the scope of the initiative.