CONTENTS

About This Course

Table of Contents

1. An Introduction to Environmental Strategies
2. Types of Environmental Approaches
3. Putting Environmental Strategies To Work

Supplements
References
Resources

Environmental Strategies for Prevention
A Guide To Helping the Prevention Professional Work Effectively in the Community

Collaboration

Collaboration is "the process of participation through which people, groups, and organizations come together in a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship to work toward results they are more likely to achieve together than alone." ref

Collaboration helps communities improve their capacity to improve policies, draw attention to public health issues, and develop partnerships that can be applied in other areas. Many of the most successful collaborative efforts combine collaboration with communications, policy, or education strategies.

Successful collaborative efforts: ref

• Address an important community need.
• Allow members to work well together.
• Have broad support and involvement from the community.
• Are inclusive.
• Include members who are willing to invest the necessary time and who see the collaboration as a long-term effort.
• Emphasize shared decisionmaking.
• Frequently require participants to change the way they do things in their own organizations.

Prevention professionals can serve as the "glue" that keeps the collaborative process working at the local level. The skilled prevention expert is empathetic; he or she has the ability to not just see the problem from diverse perspectives but to recognize that business people, law enforcement, faith communities, and other community members may need guidance learning how to communicate with each other. Collaborative efforts may uncover the fact that community members have diverse expectations for prevention outcomes (a local business person may focus on reduced hospital costs whereas law enforcement may be motivated by the need for decreasing alcohol-related cases). Successful collaboration efforts are those that avoid bickering and divisiveness and use the diverse expectations of its members to create a united front to demonstrate the impact of a problem across the spectrum.