Five-Stage Process for Developing a Profamily Community System

Melaville, Blank, and Asayesh (1993) describe the five-stage process for changing a community's current system of services into a profamily system:

• "Stage One: Getting Together. At this stage, a small group comes together to explore how to improve services for children and families. They identify other stakeholders with a stake in the same issue, make a joint commitment to collaborate, and agree on a unifying theme. They also establish shared leadership, set basic ground rules for working together, secure initial support, and determine how to finance collaborative planning.

• Stage Two: Building Trust and Ownership. Next, partners establish common ground. They share information about each other and the needs of families and children in their community. Using this information, they create a shared vision of what a better service-delivery system would look like, and they develop a mission statement and a set of goals to guide their future actions.

• Stage Three: Developing a Strategic Plan. Here, partners begin to explore options that flow from their common concerns and shared vision. They agree to focus on a specific geographic area, and they design a prototype delivery system that incorporates the elements of their shared vision. Partners also develop the technical tools and interagency agreements needed to put their plan into action. During this stage, the group may go back to preceding stages to bring in new partners and to continue building ownerships.

• Stage Four: Taking Action. Partners begin to implement the prototype. They use the information it provides to adjust the policies and practices of the organizations that comprise the prototype service-delivery system. Partners design an ongoing evaluation strategy that helps them to identify specific systems-change requirements, make midcourse corrections, and measure the results.

• Stage Five: Going to Scale. Finally, partners take steps to ensure that systems-change strategies and capacities developed in the prototype are adapted, expanded, and recreated in locations throughout the community where profamily services are needed. To do this, partners continue to develop local leadership, strengthen staff capacity by changing preservice and inservice training, and build a strong constituency for change." (p. 20)