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We're teaming up with AIR for a two-part webinar!

10/28/2020

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We are pleased to announce a two-part webinar series collaboration between the Wandersman Center and the American Institutes for Research called “Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Education and Health System: The Role of Readiness.” The first webinar "The Role of Readiness in Education: How Can Families Be Ready for the “New Normal” in Education?” focusing on the readiness of schools and families to support students’ education in an unprecedented time of change, is Friday November 6 from 1:00-2:00pm EST. You can register for the webinar at this link: https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/385141741423790859.
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The second webinar, which focuses on readiness in healthcare for chronic disease as a result of COVID-19, will be held on Thursday, November 19 from 2:00-3:00pm EST (link to register forthcoming, tentative title: “Cancer, Heart Disease, Diabetes, and Chronic Diseases Have Not Gone Away Because of COVID: How Can We be Ready to Optimize Chronic Condition Care?). If you have any questions or would like more information about the webinars, please email Brittany Cook at brittany.s.cook@wandersmancenter.org.
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Why We Don’t Work With Organizations…

7/5/2020

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As evaluators, we believe in turning the evaluative lens.
We believe in accountability.
We believe in transparency.

And we believe in admitting when we were wrong.

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Implementation Matters

6/19/2020

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Our first international webinar was a success! With our friends and colleagues Julia Moore and Sobia Khan from the Center for Implementation, we delivered a fully virtual and interactive two hour event on Readiness and Implementation Science. We were so excited to have participants from North America, Australia and Africa join us. Not only did we get to present and train others on Readiness, but we got to hear from almost 120 people what their thoughts were and how they might apply it to their own work. One major goal of the Wandersman Center is to spread our ideas and readiness framework in a way that inspires action and helps organizations, and we're excited and grateful for this opportunity to do so. Look out for more trainings or tools from us, and if you're interested in hearing more about this webinar, please email us at hello@wandersmancenter.org. 

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Hey Owl! Can you actually build readiness?  Yup.

4/13/2020

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So, a quick story first.   About eight years ago, whether readiness could be changed was an open question. Intuitively, the answer was yes. After all, change efforts have been going on throughout human history.  However, many people were still thinking about organizations are "ready " or "not ready," without really digging into the things that help make an organization ready.  
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This is one of our central premises.  Readiness isn't just one thing; it's a dynamic collection of motivational and capacity-based concepts that together contribute to how well an innovation gets put into a practice.  So, a bunch of us started on a comprehensive research synthesis to see if there was evidence that these specific subcomponents could be change.   And the answer was,  "Yup!"  

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Randy Schwartz joins the Wandersman Center

4/8/2020

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We are delighted to bring Randy Schwartz, MSPH, onboard with the Wandersman Center.  Randy is a nationally recognized public health professional with over thirty-five years’ experience in implementing health promotion/disease prevention initiatives in state health department and voluntary health organizations with an emphasis on chronic disease prevention and control, cancer control, tobacco control, community-based health promotion and healthy public policy. He is currently President of Public Health Systems Consultants, and serves as the Sr. Public Health Consultant for Cancer Control with the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors (NACDD). He is an Adjunct Faculty member for several leading academic public health programs. Randy has written and presented on the importance of engaging public health practitioners along with researchers and engaged communities as a key factor in advancing implementation science. 

Randy brings to The Wandersman Center his strong experience as a public health practitioner, thus grounding the reality of implementation in real world situations. He has a long history of linking public health practice with academic and research partners to advance translation, dissemination and quality implementation. Randy’s participation with the work of the Wandersman Center will help bring that lens of real world public health practice to our work.

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Aimee White joins the Wandersman Center!

3/30/2020

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​After 16 years of running Custom Evaluation Services, Inc. Aimee N. White is stepping into the Wandersman Center as a Senior Fellow. As a career evaluation practitioner and educator, Aimee is taking her community-based Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment evaluation approaches to work with a long-time esteemed colleague and his talented, interdisciplinary Center. Dr. Abraham Wandersman is a well-respected Psychology Distinguished Emeritus Professor and evaluation practitioner, having co-founded the Getting To Outcomes (GTO) framework that recently celebrated 20 years of successful use across government, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors.
 The Wandersman Center is focused on innovative ways to scale the use of GTO, bring the concept of “Readiness” to the evaluation field through the R=MC2 model, and enhance the evidence-based practice of providing technical assistance for organization improvement and increased achievement of outcomes. Aimee is deeply committed to the use of evaluation practice to further social justice-oriented causes and is excited to join forces with the Wandersman Center team.

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Using Implementation Science To Flatten The Coronavirus Curve- The Time Is Now

3/30/2020

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“Before the Coronavirus Outbreak, A Cascade of Warnings Went Unheeded, Government Exercises, including a pandemic simulation last year, made it clear that the U.S. was not ready for a crisis like the coronavirus”
Re: “Halting Virus will Require Harsh Steps, Expert Says: Near Total Cooperation from Public is Key to Isolating Clusters of Infection.”  (NYT, March 23, 2020).

There is Good News.  China has turned the curve on the coronavirus (no new cases as of 3/19/20); South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong internationally are containing the virus….but America is not ready.  There are things that these countries are doing that appear to work (called evidence-based practices).  Why can’t we do the same thing? Are we ready to adapt these methods to this country?  Of course, it will take hard work and “near total cooperation from public to stay 6 feet apart from everyone else, work from home (or not at all) for weeks or months, have no meetings, parties, not to go to gyms, sporting events, concerts, bars, or restaurants, maybe even not leave our neighborhoods or houses for a while.  But it’s better than months of sickness all around us, our doctors and hospitals overwhelmed with more patients than they can care for, and our parents and grandparents denied intensive care because there isn’t enough, and dying before they have to.
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And meet me tonight in Atlantic City: February 2020

2/28/2020

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​“Well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night…..”
 
We were pleased to launch two Jersey-centric projects this month.  First, we are working with JBS International, the OMNI Institute, and NJAMHAA to help build organizational capacity for Motivational Interviewing and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. We met the full project team in Trenton to discuss project goals and provide an overview of readiness. Many members of our team have a background in the behavioral health and substance abuse treatment field, so it is great to be working back in that content area. The idea of motivation x capacity derives from the concept of being willing and able and our experiences in direct clinical services. History circles back around! 

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It's February Already?  January 2020 Recap

2/4/2020

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​Yes, yes, this newsletter is late again. My bad.
 
The big news out of this month is that the Annual Report is finally out. We accomplished a huge amount of research and progress last year constructing our readiness building systems. You can read all about it in this blog post. Feel free to distribute the report to colleagues or really anyone who is interested in readiness building. 

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Our Annual Report is here!

1/31/2020

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​2019 was a busy year for us and we have our annual report to show for it! The Wandersman Center applied the R=MC2 heuristic in over 16 projects with partners across the country. 

In this report, we share our accomplishments and advancements in how readiness can be used to promote change for social good. Some of our more notable advancements include modifications to our assessment phase, a new process to improve CMOR and how we build readiness, and our recently released Prevention Readiness Guide. 
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While we learned a lot this year and are proud the work we’ve done, we recognize that we still have a big to-do list, and the report outlines some of these priority areas for 2020 (including the development of our interactive web platform for readiness)! We’re excited for what’s to come in 2020 and eager to share all of it with you! 

Click here to see our past annual reports and other reports or presentations.
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Closing the door on 2019

12/31/2019

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​By the time I hit publish on this post, it may already be 2020 where you live.  HAPPY NEW YEAR to our friends and colleagues in Australia, Japan, India, and anywhere east of Riyadh and Istanbul.  For the rest of our US-based team, we still have a few hours to finish up our task lists, our cleaning, and our blog posts before heading out for the night [actually staying in and eating Doritos with 5-year-olds].
 
We here are the Wandersman Center managed to cram a bunch into the final month of the decade. First, we finally put out our Readiness Building Guide. This effort was the culmination of a massive amount of thinking and writing over the past year, informed greatly bu our experiences working on sexual assault prevention in the military with colleagues at the RAND Corporation.  Read all about it and download it at the following link.


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Books Jonathan read in 2019, ranked

12/23/2019

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I read a lot of books. Here’s my ranking for 2019, from best to worst. There a lot of business books here because a) we have a business, and b) we want to tap into the broader literature to better understand how we can build momentum in organizations. After all, humans have been implementing organization change for at least 12,000 years. Let’s not limit ourselves to the last decade of implementation science literature. 

​If I had to summarize all these books into one phrase: Be open and honest about your work, or, as the Bard says:

This above all: to thine own self be true

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A new path in addressing inequity: Community Currencies.

12/11/2019

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The New York Times recently published an article about inequality. Recent evidence suggests that the differences in income do not match measures of differences in actual skills, intelligence, personality traits. In other words, most low-wage workers are underpaid, and many of the highest-paid professionals are overpaid according to these metrics.

“The average African-American adult with a graduate degree demonstrates the same level of cognitive ability as the average person in the top 1 percent of income. Yet 99 percent of African-Americans with graduate degrees do not have incomes high enough to be in the top 1 percent.”

The authors identified several factors contributing to this inequality, including well-connected interest groups manipulating markets for their constituencies’ benefit, professional organizations blocking access to jobs by requiring credentials to perform specific tasks, and zoning boards blocking access to housing markets  perpetuating social segregation.


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First look at our Readiness Building Systems Guide!

12/6/2019

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​Our team has been working hard over the last few months to create a guide that gives an overview of the Readiness Building Systems (RBS) approach. We’ve come pretty far since the 2015 article on the R=MC2 heuristic. The guide describes in detail how we’re using the RBS in projects, starting with initial engagement. We share we’ve been using Intervention Mapping to develop tailored readiness building strategies for different sites in one of our projects. We’re excited to share it with the public for the first time! 

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Thanks for the 20 years!

12/2/2019

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PictureAbe in repose following the annual AEA dinner.
The year was 1999.  Cher’s Believe and TLC’s No Scrubs were burning up the charts.  It was the best movie year ever. Gas cost $1.17 a gallon.  And, an intrepid group of young evaluators came up with Getting to Outcomes.
 



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The Participatory Paradox of Objective Measures

11/22/2019

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As long as I’ve known about evaluation, I’ve known about David Fetterman. Together with my colleague, Abe Wanderman, they developed the field of empowerment evaluation in the mid to late 1990s. However, David also draws from an anthropological background when he approaches research and evaluation. Recently, he published the 4th edition of his Ethnography text. Knowing nothing about this area of his work (nor having read previous editions), I dove in.

David took the cover photo himself on his way to base camp!This isn’t a book review. I don’t have any referent point with which to judge the quality of the except that I know David generally does quality work
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Instead, I’d like to zero in on two methodological topics that stuck out: Unobtrusive Measures and the Analysis of Qualitative Data. This first article in a two-article series deals with the unobtrusive measures.


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A good breakfast starts with TOAST

11/19/2019

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Our team recently got back from the annual American Evaluation Association's conference in Minneapolis, MN.  AEA is the premier conference for evaluators and methodologists who work in the social and governmental sectors to share their recent innovations, results, and lessons learned. Like all great conference, the action happens both inside and outside of the sessions.  We have many more comment and reflections, but we first wanted to share some work that we presented on the SCALE initiative.  


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Evisceration and Dissemination Research!

11/1/2019

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Hey there, boils and ghouls! What would Shock-tober be without DEVILISLY delightful progress toward Com-BOO-nity empowerment? We all know that DEAD-iness is a product of BOO-memtum, innovation-specific, and general GHASTLY.

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“Let’s just kick the ball around.” A first-time soccer coach & implementation

10/28/2019

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​I’m a sucker for strongly worded e-mails. So, when my son’s Under-7 program coordinator sent out a plea for more volunteer coaches or “we’ll have to postpone the season,” I tentatively put my hand up.

​My experience as a first-time coach mirrored the experiences many organizations have when trying to implement a new intervention.

An organization has a thing they are trying to do. They then need to train up and support the people within that organization to do that thing. In my case, the thing was coach a bunch of five and six-year-olds. And, like organizations, my readiness to coach varied throughout the season. And, like well-functioning organizations, I was able to use data to help monitor performance and improve.

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A Day Late. A Dollar Short.

10/1/2019

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This past month has been a whirlwind for the Wandersman Center. In addition to being on opposite sides of the globe this past month for two of the premier implementation conference...


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Showing fidelity to adaptations...

9/16/2019

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We are wrapping up a thrilling and exciting week in the world of implementation science...!

At the Wandersman Center, we were fortunate enough to attend both the Society for Implementation Research Collaborative conference in Seattle and Global Implementation Conference. 

We are left with our heads spinning from the invaluable content shared by our colleagues. What an honor to be part of the #impsci community
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Drs. Wandersman and Imm share their thoughts on the US military and prevention...

9/16/2019

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Prevention. We (mostly) all agree that it is important. Still doing prevention is hard. And when you are trying to implement prevention programming for complex, multi-factorial problems - like sexual assault and harassment - it can be really hard.
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CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE SAPRO PROJECT

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What Hurricane Dorian Teaches Us About Change

9/2/2019

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It's that time of year: Hurricane season.

And this year, it's coming in with a bang. As millions of Americans are celebrating the (unofficial) end of summer, residents of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas are preparing for crisis. #HurricaneDorian, a catastrophic Cat 5 storm, is lurking over the Bahamas, teasing the Southeast United States about where it will make landfall.

​In the matter of days, it is likely that there will be a mass evacuation.

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“Summer’s lease hath all too short a date.”

8/31/2019

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As we close out a productive summer with many kiddos headed back to school (or starting school in the first place), we take stock of what’s happened over the past month.

Transitioning the RWJF Work to a New Phase. Over the past year, we were generously funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to research the application of the R=MC^2 readiness model in four different settings.
Click here to learn more about our work with rwjf

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Improving Equity through Readiness

8/21/2019

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Anyone working in human services with on the ground experience recognizes that health outcomes are influenced by more than just behavior and genetics. Environmental conditions have a significant impact on whether people can live healthy and happy lives. Gaps in these conditions contribute to wide disparities between groups. These findings are not news. Moving the needle toward progress requires that teams from different disciplines pool their best thinking together to help creatively develop new methods to address conditions that perpetuate healthy equity gaps.
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"At some point, we just have to roll up our sleeves and do something different. 

That's what readiness provides. It's the something that makes implementation a bit better."

Dr. Brittany Cook
VP of Education and Human Development
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Our Team
    • The Mission
    • The Team
    • The Faculty
  • Our Approach
    • Defining Readiness
    • Using Readiness
    • Studying Readiness
    • Getting To Outcomes
  • Our Services
    • What We Do
    • Partners & Projects
  • Learn More