Community-driven learning activities, creating futures: 30,000 people can't be wrong - can they?

Area of Science:

• Community Psychology
• Program Development
• Youth Interventions

Background:

• Community psychology practice often involves organizing community-based activities.
• Numerous programs have been developed for learning centers, schools, and technology centers.
• Over 30,000 individuals, primarily children, have participated in these programs over the past decade.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the effectiveness of community-based programs in enhancing protective factors and reducing negative factors in at-risk communities.
• To analyze the factors influencing program sustainability and skill generalization.
• To explore the role of "feedforward" (visualizing future success) in program design.

Main Methods:

• Development of community-responsive programs focused on literacy, education, and life/work skills.
• Implementation of self-modeling with feedforward techniques within programs.
• Analysis of data on skill generalization, attitude maintenance, and program sustainability.

Main Results:

• Participants generalized and maintained new skills and attitudes.
• Program sustainability showed variability.
• Program-level feedforward was identified as critical for bringing future success into the present.

Conclusions:

• Community-based programs can effectively impart skills and positive attitudes.
• Program sustainability is variable and influenced by factors like program-level feedforward.
• Integrating individual and community-level practices is essential for informing each other.