Today I want to extend on a keynote address I gave in 1999 at a conference at the University of Newcastle which was published earlier this year in Children Australia (Scott, 1999) and explore what appear to be effective elements in programs aimed at strengthening families and rebuilding communities. In doing so I will draw upon examples from my recent research and from programs with which I have been involved through my work with The Ian Potter Foundation, one of Australia's major philanthropic foundations.

In some of its areas of interest such as the environment and social welfare, the Potter Foundation has implemented a strategic and partnership model based on "innovation, evaluation and dissemination". That is, it actively seeks out as well as responding to unsolicited but promising grant applications, opportunities to test an innovative approach to a significant problem. If the evaluation is encouraging, the task is then to disseminate the knowledge and skills to others and try to help the approach "go to scale" across the country.

Despite the pervasive gloom and doom which is the spirit of our age, I believe that there are grounds for some hope. We now have the conceptual and empirical components of a strong foundation for developing programs aimed at family strengthening and community building. I will outline these components, give examples of what I see as promising programs and then draw the common ingredients from these programs and identify some of the challenges such programs face in "going to scale".

In this presentation I will be talking about what might be called "micro community building" - interventions aimed at developing natural helping networks around families and generating social capital at the neighbourhood level, not macro community interventions which are aimed at addressing economic decline in a whole region or large scale social reform. Obviously both are important.

• an ecological way of understanding families and communities

We have recently witnessed a re-emergence of an ecological understanding of child development and family life developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner and extended by James Garbarino. This perspective provides an analytical framework which bridges a psychological and a sociological level of analysis, thus encompassing the social exterior as well as the psychological interior of family life. Bronfenbrenner spoke of the social environment as akin to a "set of Russian dolls, each nested within the other" or a series of concentric circles starts with the innermost circle of the microsystem of the family, moves out to the mesosystem of kith and kin and neighbourhood social networks, to the exosystem of the service system and labour market, and finally to the macro level of the cultural blueprint. In the real life of the social world, of course, there are no such arbitrary boundaries, and we are faced with something as dynamic and as complex as any natural ecology.

James Garbarino reminds us that while the most socially toxic of western communities are those which are materially impoverished, there are some low income communities that are well endowed with social capital while there are affluent communities which have little social capital and where children are not free to move beyond their walls and elderly people live in fear. We therefore need to identify the strengths which are present in healthy communities and seek to replicate these strengths elsewhere.

The ecological perspective is an overarching conceptual framework which is essentially descriptive rather than prescriptive. In itself it does not provide programmatic models for intervention.

• new research on prevention which can guide effective programs

We now have a growing body of research on vulnerability and resilience, much of it based on strong longitudinal studies. This is complemented by a growing body of research on the evaluation of prevention strategies. A recent meta-analysis of 1200 outcome studies of US prevention demonstrates that the same set of risk factors at the levels of the individual child, the family, the peer group, the school environment and the broader community is associated with eight major negative outcomes including child behavioural and mental health problems, school failure, drug use, and child abuse. And the same set of protective factors, including the availability of social support, is associated with positive outcomes for children and adolescents. It is this body of knowledge which underpins the Federal Government’s Pathways to Prevention initiative in crime prevention, and which is also behind the Communities that Care program focussed on adolescents in high risk communities.

In the words of the reviewer, Joseph Durlak:

There are two messages for us here. One, that the separate silos such as those of health, mental health, education and welfare must end. Strong bridges must be built between these silos at the policy creation, program development and service delivery levels. And two, that in relation to our prevention programs we need formative evaluations, that is, evaluations focussed on process, not just summative evaluations focussed on outcomes. That is, we not only need to know if programs work but we also need to know how and why they work. Knowing the therapeutic ingredients - what actually happened in the program and under what conditions, to make it work, is vital if we are to adapt programs and transfer them to other contexts.

Creative and innovative programs are emerging in communities across Australia as well as those developed overseas being implemented here. We need to identify the core elements of effective home grown and imported programs and explore their potential to be transplanted in different community contexts.

I have selected just a few examples in order to highlight different issues. Each in a different way is involved in generating social support for families with young children. We know that deficits in social support are strongly associated with a broad range of psycho-social problems including maternal depression and child neglect, but we should not assume that this is a simple unilinear relationship. Deficits in social support may be a function of an individual's or family's limited capacity for reciprocity, the life blood of social networks.

The first example deals with the transition to parenthhood and is based in maternal and child health services in 2 outer urban fringe Melbourne municipalities.

The second is an early childhood education program focussed on literacy development for one to three year olds in socially disadvantaged families in rural NSW.

The third is an imported program model for primary school aged children with behavioral and related problems and involves child welfare agencies working in close collaboration with primary schools.

The fourth is a community development project undertaken by a child and family welfare agency in a stigmatised and socially disadvantaged rural community.

For over 20 years the untapped potential of maternal and child health centres has fascinated me and been the focus of much of my research. We have had such services since the 1920s and 1930s and what were infant health focussed services are now trying to broaden their focus to include family psycho-social well-being.

In Victoria over the past few years, all maternal and child health services have been funded to provide new parent groups for first time parents. Approximately two thirds of first time mothers join such groups. These groups run for six to eight weeks within the first few months of birth and have an educational focus on feeding, safety in the home, settling techniques etc, but they also have a social support function. Facilitating such groups is a new role for the nurses and a statewide professional development program was created to help nurses perform this role in a way which was less didactic and more likely to facilitate group cohesion and sharing between families going through the transition to parenthood.

My recent research, funded by the Department of Human Services and the University of Melbourne, has evaluated the outcomes of these 6 to 8 week groups in terms of their capacity to create self-sustaining social networks.

We followed up all women who joined such groups in 1996 in two outer urban municipalities of Melbourne and found that 1 to 2 years later over 80% of these women are still meeting in their groups on an informal basis, usually in one another’s home. Even when the group does not continue, usually due to some women returning to paid employment, many of the women continue significant one-to-one friendships with one another, and some of these have become whole family to family friendships. These women talked about "getting together for the children" as the main reason for the group continuing but they also report marked benefits for themselves in terms of confidence as a parent, social contact and support.

We have published these results elsewhere. However, an outcome evaluation only tells us so much. I also set out to document the diversity of ways in which nurses approached their work with these groups and how they had to adapt to the particular needs of their area. Some nurses were more successful in including fathers in the groups. They would hold one of the groups in the evening and specifically invite the fathers to come along with their partners for a session on "infant resuscitation". None of this involved talking sharing and caring stuff, at least not initially. It was down on the floor learning practical skills in how to save your child’s life which was what got these blokes in the door, but once they were captive, one nurse with a wonderful sense of humour had them eating out of her hand, talking about the challenges of fatherhood, the changes to the couple relationship following the birth ("what happened to sex?" she would ask and everyone would laugh), and on top of this, even broached the sensitive area of the dangers of shaking babies.

Some nurses were more successful in engaging adolescent mothers, sometimes forming special groups for them. One nurse would put aside the usual list of topics, and just sit on the floor with these young women making babies’ toys, listening to their many troubles, not prematurely pushing parenting propaganda which she knew would not go down well, and buying them coke rather than tea and coffee. The girls would drive down in unlicensed cars to come to the group until she arranged for a council bus to bring them. It is in the fine detail of professional practice that you find the pearls of practice wisdom. Rarely is this captured in program evaluation. Only by describing such detail can innovative and creative work be transmitted to others.

The points I want to make with this example are these:

• The program required thinking beyond the silos of "health" and "welfare"

• This innovation was incremental and was done within an existing service system. There is no way that government resources would have been available to have mounted a program like this outside an existing service.

• A professional development program was necessary to enhance the skills of staff to deliver this program.

• It tapped the resources within the community for mutual aid - the professional was merely the catalyst or yeast for a naturally occurring social process.

• It reached out to families from an accessible, non-stigmatised setting, was universal, based on broad goals of facilitating healthy parenthood and, not "preventing child abuse and neglect" in a targetted "at risk" group.

An ecological perspective leads us to see a maternal and child health centre as a village well for new parents, a potential nucleus in neighbourhood networks where information is informally exchanged and where friendships have a chance to develop between those experiencing a common life transition. We need to identify and exploit the potential of more village wells in our communities - for people of all ages and stages in the family life cycle. With imagination we can deliberately tap the potential of naturally occurring sites of spontaneous social interaction such as day care centres, kindergartens, parks, laundromats, churches, schools.

The pioneering work of Associate Professor Laurie Makin of the University of Newcastle on the Central coast of NSW is a fine example of a program which has as its manifest goal that of enhancing the emergent literacy of one to three year aged children in socially disadvantaged families in rural environments. While ostensibly an early literacy program, it is delivered in a way which places the parents at centre stage of their child’s literacy development, thus tapping into their aspirations for their children. It also brings families together as a group for a common purpose, thus creating supportive social networks.

The initial evaluations of Laurie Makin's program are most encouraging. She has recently extended the program into an indigenous community with the assistance of an indigenous PhD student and the model is being adapted to fit the needs of this community.

Over the past decade we have seen a growth in imported family-strengthening program models from the UK and the US. These include secondary prevention programs such as volunteer-based home visiting services like HomeStart (introduced by the Family Action Centre, University of Newcastle) and tertiary prevention programs like NEWPIN, a group therapy and non-residential therapeutic community program for depressive and abusive mothers (introduced by Burnside, a Uniting Church NGO in Sydney).

The Potter Foundation has supported both of these programs in Australia and is currently involved in introducing the FAST program or Families and School Together Program in partnership with 10 Uniting Church child and family welfare agencies throughout urban and rural Victoria. An external evaluation of these pilot programs has been funded and this is being done by the Victorian Parenting Centre. There is also an internal evaluation built into the program.

FAST is based in primary schools and reaches out to families experiencing a range of difficulties such as child behavioural problems via the school. Parents are invited to join other families one evening a week for an intensive 8 week program which has a number of core elements, each of which has been demonstrated to be effective. The distinctive feature of FAST is its integration of these elements.

As well as focussing on parent-child interaction and parent to parent communication, the program generates strong bonds between the families, with each family taking a turn to prepare a simple meal for everyone. In the second phase of the program, the parents continue to meet to sustain the gains which they have made, and parents from previous cohorts of the program are invited to assist in the next cohort of the program. This move from helpee to helper is a characteristic of many successful mutual aid programs.

Imported program models face special challenges. To transfer program models successfully requires a good grasp of the context in which the program was initially developed and how this is similar to and different from the context in which one is seeking to introduce it. This is often hard to do because there are aspects of the original service system which we do not know about and which are so taken for granted by those who work within that context that they do not realise the effective components of their own context.

In trying to replicate successful programs from other systems, including across national borders, there is also the dilemma of how far to adapt the program to one’s own context and risk throwing out some of the vital ingredients or sticking so slavishly to the recipe that necessary adaptations are not made. In the implementation of the FAST program a cautious approach has been taken to program modification and in fact a licensing system limits the degree to which modifications can be made.

Some imported ones generate their own promotional hype and can come to be seen as a panacea for complex and interrelated social problems. Unrealistic expectations can lead to counterproductive effects. There is also a risk that secondary prevention programs will be used as tertiary prevention strategies and when this happens they are very likely to fail. For example in a FAST program which has a majority of highly stressed families with serious problems of drug dependence and domestic violence, it is unlikely that there will be sufficient capacity for reciprocity between families for social networks to develop.

St Luke's Child and Family Services in Bendigo received a grant from the Potter Foundation for a three year community development project in Long Gully near Eaglehawk just outside of Bendigo. It is an area with a lot of public housing and many isolated single parent families from Melbourne are allocated houses there. The three years has now ended and the external evaluation has just been released. It is hard to summarise the Shared Action program as it worked on a range of projects emerging from consultation with the community. These included an oral history project, family and school linking projects, the development of a new playground and the creation of an Under 11 football club. Each one of these was a rich and complex project.

For example, how an under 10 football club was nurtured into being and how it has flourished in this deprived and stigmatised community, is a classic Australian story of neighbourhood social cohesion being generated through sport. What has been created in that community is far more than a children's football team. Through the football club many issues have been faced such as norms relating to violence and fair play, and many people have become involved in their community for the first time. Let us remember that during the 1930s football clubs contributed greatly to the strong social cohesion in urban working class communities and that it was this social cohesion which sustained social capital and helped communities cope with the Great Depression.

While these programs are all very different, there are some similarities:

• They are all located within natural, non-stigmatising social settings

• Professionals delivering programs are focussed as much on "process" or on the generation of social cohesion and interaction between participants as they are on delivering the "content" or achieving a specific task.

• While having community building as a latent goal, these programs had their appeal by adopting manifest goals which were very specific and which were not problem focussed

Innovative programs may also confront similar challenges.

• Precisely because they transcend the silos of different sectors they are vulnerable to "buck passing" when it comes to government funding

• Programs may be effective but unsuccessful in gaining ongoing funding and so can damage communities. We have seen too many examples of programs which draw heavily upon the social capital in a community - that precious reservoir of hope and goodwill, and where people invest energy and hope only to have the program collapse after a year or two for lack of funds. These programs drain the social capital from vulnerable communities. Thus it is essential that before the program begins there is a viable strategy for its sustainability in place.

• New programs often have short term appeal due to the insatiable political appetite for new initiatives, yet all too often the resources for the new initiatives come from existing programs. This is not a problem if it is clear that the old program needs to be discarded but we have examples of excellent programs being sacrificed, sometimes for new programs which have a lot less going for them. Sometimes good programs are destroyed only to be reinvented at a later date. Hence we see visiting child health nurses programs destroyed at the beginning of the 1990s in Victoria only to resurface a decade later under the guise of new outreach programs. In the process families are hurt by the withdrawal of a service, valuable staff and professional expertise are lost, and inter-agency goodwill is weakened.

To conclude, there are grounds for optimism on our journey of understanding what it might take to rebuild communities which strengthen families. To do this requires partnerships between funding sources, agencies with expertise in delivering services, and organisations with research expertise which can undertake both outcome and process evaluations. Beyond this are the tasks of dissemination and the implementation of successful initiatives in a way which ensures that essential components of effectiveness are retained while also flexibly adjusting the initiative to the needs of different service systems and communities.

Durlack, J.A. (1998) Common risk factors and protective factors in successful prevention programs, American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 68, 4, 512-520

Scott, D. (2000) Embracing what works, building communities that strengthen families, Children Australia, 25, 2, 4-9

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