Going to Scale: Disseminating Empirically Supported Social Work Interventions

The existence of abundant evidence supporting the effectiveness of specific social work interventions does not necessarily lead to their broad uptake. Furthermore, when organizations do adopt such innovations, they typically need significant training and coaching in order to successfully implement the practice. This results in the need for intervention developers to attend more explicitly to the process of dissemination to maximize the impact of their work.

This roundtable session brings together a group of seasoned intervention developers who have both carried out effectiveness research on specific models and who have promoted model implementation in the practice world. These efforts reflect diverse approaches including: establishing partnerships with existing training organizations; employing a separate business whose goal is to promote model uptake by selling training and implementation support products; and building a large scale private-public-academic initiative in which an accelerated research to practice feedback loop is employed.

Roundtable participants will summarize their dissemination experiences, focusing on what strategy was employed and why it was selected. They will then discuss the successes and challenges they encountered and how these experiences may have directed them toward different approaches. Finally, participants will join in a conversation with each other and members of the audience to consider the implications of these experiences for improving the dissemination and uptake of empirically support social work interventions and, from an innovation diffusion perspective, for informing implementation research. Further questions to be considered may include:

• Should all effective innovations be disseminated?
• How to decide what in the original model needs to be held constant, and what is the adopter allowed to vary and still be true to the model?
• Is the traditional dissemination approach of social services and the academy the best model for dissemination in the current environment? 

Participants include researchers who have led research on and disseminated the following interventions:

• Housing First
  Housing First provides persons experiencing homelessness with permanent housing as quickly as possible and then offers voluntary supportive services as needed.  
• Critical Time Intervention
  Critical Time Intervention is a time-limited care coordination model that reduces the risk of homelessness and other adverse outcomes in high-risk populations following institutional discharge and other periods of transition. 
• Mothers Overcoming Violence through Education and Empowerment (MOVE). MOVE is a domestic violence/parenting program for adult victims who are required to services by child protection and/or the court system. Developed from a unique community-university partnership, MOVE uses positive support and empowering education to ameliorate family violence.
• Concordance Academy for Successful Reentry and Well-Being. Concordance Academy is a holistic and integrated program to promote the well-being and success of individuals transitioning from prisons to communities. Formed from an innovative public-private-academic initiative, key stakeholders braided together the most effective practices to form this comprehensive reentry program model.

 An expert on diffusion of innovation and social entrepreneurship will moderate the roundtable.  

The roundtable will be of interest to researchers who develop and evaluate interventions as well as those whose primary interest lies in implementation and implementation research.