Sustainability

Project LAUNCH is creating strong systems that deliver integrated prevention, promotion and intervention services for young children in 24 communities around the country. For all grantees, the question of sustainability beyond the grant funding cycle is ever present. Each recognizes the critical importance of being able to sustain and expand innovative, successful programs, processes, and systems changes beyond the short life of a LAUNCH grant.

Toward that end, the TA Team is hosting a Sustainability Initiative starting in early 2012 to support the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in sustaining change in communities, tribes and states. The TA team embraces this definition of sustainability:

Sustainability can be defined as the long term maintenance or "institutionalization" of services that outlive their original funding, including policy and structural changes that support desired outcomes. These kinds of changes suggest sustainability even if all of the specific elements developed with the original funding are ultimately not maintained.

The TA team has developed a set of assumptions about sustainability and a set of activities for grantees that will begin with a self-assessment survey, and include a series of Webinars with pre- and post-Webinar conversations, readings, and individual technical assistance. The Self-Assessment Tool, each of the Webinars, and individual TA will lead up to activities at the spring 2012 grantee meeting and include both peer-to-peer learning and expertise from researchers and practitioners in the field. A white paper on sustainability is planned for fall of 2012.