​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

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.

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!

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!

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