William M. Harvey, executive director of the Narcotics Service Council in St. Louis, Missouri, talks about bringing the community into the design process of prevention programs. Excerpted from the video series Schools That Work: The Research Advantage, videoconference #6, Preparing Students for Drug-Free Lifestyles (North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 1992).
"And also, it's great that the schools are going out into the community, but there's been a lot going on in the communities for a long time, that the schools didn't know about, and so we shouldn't just go out and say we're going to be taking something to the community as if we're the overall experts, even though we've got research backing us up. There's a lot of information other than academic research that we ought to include in our assessments and our planning and our design and we should bring some of the people in the community who have been working in the trenches for years into designing our efforts. That's really practicing what we preach, not just preaching something."
Date posted: 1996