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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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Quick Query, Fast Feedback, Rapid Reaction

8/12/2019

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Evaluation doesn’t have to be a long, drawn out process. Sometimes you might want to find out quickly how a training, meeting, or learning session is working. We’ve got a tool for that!
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The Rapid Feedback Form (RFF) is a short and sweet assessment that captures how gains in knowledge, perceived session value, and perceived practical applicability. We’ve also added some modifications to account for training-of-trainers settings.


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Finding the "Critical Moments": Using Reflection in Evaluation

8/2/2019

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The great Paul Howard of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and I wrote this a few months ago to talk about our use of the Critical Moments Methodology for the American Evaluation Association's Community Psychology week. In the hustle and bustle, I neglected to cross post here. So enjoy!


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More than Useless: July 2019 update

7/24/2019

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The Wandersman Center held a semiannual retreat from July 17th to 19th in Columbia, SC. We were fortunately able to draw upon the insights of nearly 20 psychologists, evaluators, public health practitioners, educational specialists, and non-profit administrators, all of whom have a driving interest using implementation as a way to help organizations and communities reach outcomes. There were t-shirts. The group heard presentations focusing on several key priority areas...

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What are some of the Policy Implications of Readiness?

4/5/2019

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Our team and colleagues published a brief for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services a few years ago (HHS; Dymnicki, Wandersman, Osher, Grigorescu, & Huang, 2014) which defines the policy implications of readiness. There are three implications listed which we believe are very important for the implementation of readiness! In this blog, we discuss these implications, what they are, and what you can do.
**note: this post was written by Lauren Hurley, an undergraduate working with us in the Spring 2019 semester. It's critically important that implementation ideas be accessible to a broad audiences. This is one student's translation of some earlier work we did.*** 

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Take off...to the Great White North

3/26/2019

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​​Dr. Pam Imm and colleague Jamie Keith from Alabama, made their way to Manitoulin Island to do a GTO training for eight First Nations communities.


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What is important when? Recent community implementation findings.

3/12/2019

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We know what’s important for implementation success: consistent leaders, a supportive environment, the ability to see early wins, a charismatic champion, and many other elements. But are all these things important ALL the time? No organization has the time, funds, and buy-in to consistently measure and build all these elements. So when should we spend time boosting the champion’s visibility, versus trying to build up relationships between organizations?

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The feelings behind the words....

2/19/2019

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Our colleague, Kassy Alia, spoke at Columbia, SC’s Martin Luther King commemoration on January 21st. The full speech can be found at the video below. If you have never seen Kassy speak, you must. Her passion and genuineness shine through. But do her words reflect what we see and hear with our eyes?

Kassy Alia’s Keynote Speech at the City of Columbia’s 31st Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration
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Getting Engaged—In Family Engagement

1/18/2019

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On January 10th, partners for a statewide family engagement in schools initiative, the Carolina Family Engagement Center, gathered in a cozy conference room at the University of South Carolina. Participants represented a variety of organizations and agencies devoted to supporting the children and families in the state, including the South Carolina Department of Education, SC Center for Fathers and Families, SC Children’s Trust, the University of South Carolina Parent Advocacy Group, The Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies, Family Connection, PASOs, SC School Improvement Council, and The Center for Excellence at FMU, to name a few. The purpose of this meeting was to provide an initial orientation to Getting To Outcomes® (GTO) and the R=MC2 organizational readiness model, both of which will be used to help schools improved the ways in which they engage families


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Can't find your keys? Improving support and implementation in a school safety initiative.

1/14/2019

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Making good things happen in organizations like schools requires more than a good idea. The idea needs to be supported, implemented, and evaluated with quality. In Abe's 2009 article, Four Keys to Success (Theory, Implementation, Evaluation, and Resource/System Support): High Hopes and Challenges in Participation), he talks about the components that are needed to promote success.


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Changes in Readiness: Talking with Serve & Connect

1/11/2019

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Yesterday, our team met with representatives from Serve and Connect to talk about how readiness could be applied to scaling and improving their work in police-community relations. Using readiness is already a part of a project they are implementing in the 29203 area code in Columbia, SC that looks to improve youth outcomes.
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Planning for 2019

1/8/2019

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Over the past few days, we've been talking about how to move a practical implementation science forward in 2019. We are very fortunate to be joined by colleagues from the University of Texas Health Sciences Center (Maria Fernandez), the University of North Carolina's Center for Medication Optimization (Melanie Livet), and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte (Victoria Scott).
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Look for progress in Change Management of Readiness in the coming months...
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A Four-Headed Readiness Dragon?

12/11/2018

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One of our central premises is that readiness is applicable to multiple settings and multiple innovations. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has generously funded research into how readiness can be measured, built, and used in decision-making process across FOUR distinct projects, bound together by a common thread of enhancing the tangible application of readiness.


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Using a Readiness x Relationships Frame to Support Police and Community Relationships

12/7/2018

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​Relationships between police and marginalized communities have a long history of tension in the United States. Research indicates that marginalized communities, especially low-income, minority populations, experience the greatest distrust in police. This distrust is grounded in generations of adverse police experience, such as those experienced during the Civil Rights movement, and are magnified by recent highly publicized shootings of unarmed individuals of color. These events have been associated with heightened trauma in minority communities. Overall, the strained relationships restrict access to resources needed for building community safety and reduce well-being among marginalized populations.
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With the support of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Serve & Connect* and the Wandersman Center are seeking to develop and test a model for fostering police and community partnerships that is based on a readiness x relationships framework

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(Not the) Best Poster at NIH D & I

12/5/2018

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Some work we did about as year ago in Himchal Pradesh, India was nominated for Best Poster at this year's NIH Dissemination and Implementation Conference. This was the first time that the then-named Readiness Monitoring Tool (now the RDT) was used cross-culturally. Since this work concluded, we have also applied readiness concepts in French and Thai-speaking settings.
Also, we didn't win.
However, you can check out the results below. We've also added a four-page handout to our tools section that goes into a little more depth on this work.
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Happy Thanksgiving from the Wandersman Center!

11/23/2018

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There's plenty to be thankful about as 2018 draws to a close. Our group is finally off the group and spreading the work about readiness and evaluative thinking. We've had great response to our 2017-2018 Annual Report and Readiness Thinking Tool. And there are some babies on the way.

Hoping you all can spend the holidays with those who are important to you!
Click here to learn more about our available tools
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Talking 'bout evaluation...

11/15/2018

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Applied evaluation can be kind of opaque. I talked about our work and the values behind it on the Everyday Evaluation podcast. It came off pretty good, except for the part when I start going off into space talking about big data and machine learning. 
click here to listen to the podcast
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Readiness Thinking Tool

11/7/2018

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When orienting stakeholders, we often find it very helpful to engage them in Readiness Thinking. Readiness Thinking involve considering, on a high level, whether an organization or a team is willing and able to implement a change. To help make this more concrete, we then break down what it means to be willing (motivation) and able (innovation-specific and general capacities.)
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In the Readiness Building Systems section of our website, we uploaded a tool that you can use with yourself, or your stakeholders, that can make readiness more concrete. Happy Changing!
CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR AVAILABLE TOOLS
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Welcome to the Wandersman Center!

11/2/2018

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Hello fellow traveler! We're glad you've stopped by our little corner of the internet. Our group is creating some amazing and power implementation support tools, so please reach out to us to find out more.
If you have some time to kill in the car or on the elliptical, also check our my interview on the Everyday Evaluation podcast. I talked about the scope of improvement work, and how it aligns with the values of community psychology.
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http://everydayevaluation.libsyn.com/website
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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 and Projects
  • Learn More