The ASU REACH Institute collaborates with community partners to accomplish the goal of advancing research, education, and the health and well-being of children and families. We believe that all children deserve a positive future and that families have the capacity to improve their parenting beliefs and behaviors to promote more positive parent-child interactions, enhance child health and development, and increase family self-sufficiency. ASU REACH community partnerships bring together academic researchers, educators, providers, administrators, and policy makers to work toward feasible and sustainable dissemination of evidence-based intervention and prevention programs in the community. Community partners are diverse and represent several service sectors, including community health centers, schools, government agencies, and hospitals.
Community Health Centers and Hospitals
Many of the REACH programs collaborate with community health centers that provide behavioral and physical health services to families to promote evidence-based service delivery in the community. Despite the explosion of evidence-based interventions in recent decades, the uptake of EBIs in community behavioral health centers has been poor due to barriers that challenge integration of EBIs into community service delivery systems. Faculty at the ASU REACH Institute are collaborating with community health centers to increase accessibility and utilization of evidence-based interventions. Hospitals provide opportunities for integration of evidence-based behavioral health with medical services, potentially increasing access to behavioral health services for those persons least likely to seek these services.
Schools
Schools are an excellent milieu to promote the delivery of evidence-based interventions for children and families. Children spend a significant portion of their day in school, and school provides a structured setting for the delivery of evidence-based services. Moreover, schools are invested in increasing parent engagement in school activities, and funders of school-based programming are increasingly mandating that selected programs are evidence-based. Faculty at the ASU REACH Institute have collaborated with several school districts to develop, implement, and evaluate evidence-based programming for students diverse in age, ethnicity, and race.
Government Agencies
Government agencies, such as state Departments of Health and Human Services, have the potential for broad dissemination of evidence-based programs. State-level departments can build workforce capacity to deliver evidence-based programs through policy changes that require staff training in and utilization of evidence-based programs. In this way, dissemination through state and government agencies has the potential to increase access to evidence-based programs and reach a significant number of children and families.
