Palm Beach County's Community Readiness to Act: Preparation Stage

Center for Child Counseling provided multiple opportunities to gather the experiences, ideas, and input from Palm Beach County's sector leaders and influencers using a Community Readiness Assessment, a broader Think Tank event, individual meetings, a targeted leadership meeting, and conversations with key levers of change to refine and include context and content.

Since 2016, feedback from the community, particularly parents and school staff, has been gathered through school and community-based workshops, consultation, and conversations Center for Child Counseling leadership has been actively involved in community conversations and other initiatives including Healthier Together and Birth to 22's Trauma Informed Community Team.

Community Readiness Survey

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Center for Child Counseling used the Colorado State University's College of Natural Sciences, Tri Ethnic Center's Community Readiness Model to assess Palm Beach County

A trained facilitator and the online handbook were utilized The available modifications were also used to include a larger interview population and improve the timing of the scoring process

Benefits of the model include:

It is an inexpensive and easy-to-use tool

It encourages the use of local experts and resources

It provides both a vocabulary for communicating about readiness and a metric for gauging progress

It helps create community-specific and culturally-specific interventions.

It can identify types of prevention and intervention efforts that are appropriate

According to the Community Readiness Survey, Palm Beach County is in the Preparation Stage

This is the 5th stage in the 9 established stages of readiness.

What Does This Mean?

In the 5th stage, most community members have at least heard about local efforts to educate or mitigate the effects of ACEs Leadership is actively supportive of continuing or improving current efforts or in developing new efforts

The attitude in the community is:

Community members have basic knowledge about causes, consequences, signs and symptoms. There are some resources identified that could be used for further efforts to address the issue Community members or leaders are actively working to secure these resources

The Palm Beach County community readiness stage of 5 provides the foundation to confidently move forward with suggesting a public health framework as well as ideas for levers of change and innovation