Implementing and Evaluating the Communities That Care Prevention System in Rural Pennsylvania

Communities That Care (CTC) is a prevention-planning system that helps community members plan, implement, and evaluate evidence-based prevention strategies that target common behavioral problems among youth. Recent evaluations of the system have indicated promising results. To date, most of these studies have examined broad effects across multiple implementation sites. The purpose of the current study was to determine if such promising results could be replicated in a single rural county that has been implementing the CTC system for more than a decade. The results of this utilizationfocused evaluation indicate a variety of positive effects on outcomes among adolescents.