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

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

Readiness-Focused Technical Assistance. Ariel Domlyn, Tara Kenworthy, Jonathan Scaccia, and Alison Dymnicki of the American Institute for Research traveled to the CDC’s Office for Smoking and Health in Atlanta to meet with federal and state-level stakeholder working in tobacco policy. We heard about the benefits and challenges of putting a readiness-focused technical assistance model into place.

Some people, including state-level representatives, found that being able to engage with the readiness data helped them to conceptualize and frame what conditions would help them to implement their prevention plans. We also heard from project officers who reported that being able to feed readiness into a specific action plan that pulled from our work in Change Management of Readiness (CMOR) was most beneficial.
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Making Cross-Sector Partnerships Thrive. Two of the RWJF projects (Serve &Connect and The Farley Health Policy Center, are focused on building readiness for partnership across multiple stakeholders. Read more about Farley’s work at the excellent website (https://coloradoisready.org/) that outlines several key findings from their readiness assessment.

Hearing from the Experts on Community and School Safety. The Council of Advisors for the Research of Lowering Violence in Community and Schools study met in DC to review recent progress and help the project team think through thorny measurement issues. It was great to expand our thinking to encompass qualitative methods and to hear from local, on-the-ground stakeholders about their hopes for the study. And, one of our great co-PIs, Trish Campie, got us t-shirts.

Talking about Readiness and Community Transformation. We were able to have productive discussion with a group of community stakeholders convened by Healthy Communities Delaware (Go Blue Hens!) to share our experiences mainstreaming formative evaluation and supporting community health efforts in SCALE. In particular, we focused on how you can use readiness to address health equity gaps, and how the Community Transformation Map (and similar methods) can raise community consciousness and aid in planning.

Dr. Soma Saha speaks with Dr. Karyl Rattay about improving community health equity

Training liaisons towards supporting family engagement in schools. Regional family engagement liaisons with the Carolina Family Engagement Center (CFEC) rounded out a week of orientation with a full day of Wandersman Center Readiness and Getting To Outcomes® training. The training included modeling and practice scenarios to build the liaisons’ readiness to introduce and engage principals in participating schools to CFEC. There also may have been an impromptu readiness and GTO rap performance.

​Sharing in September. We’ve got some long plane rides coming up in September. Hope to see many of you at Society for Implementation Research Collaborative’s biennial conference in Seattle and/or at the Global Implementation Society’s conference in Glasgow.