Evaluation of the community safety initiative of the childhood development initiative

Engaging communities is hard work. Enabling the effective participation of communities in order to impact on outcomes and affect change is extremely challenging and inevitably there are complex and multiple needs in areas of disadvantage. There are no universally accepted, proven models that can be readily replicated, no commonly agreed way to ensure such engagement and no single pathway to improving safety and sense of belonging, especially in communities with long histories of difficulty and deep-rooted disempowerment. If there were, there would be no need for evaluation, test sites or demonstration projects. Instead of evidenced interventions, however, we have frameworks, principles and approaches, which we collectively understand to be useful and possibly even required elements of community safety. This emerging understanding, based on limited research, strong instinct and a growing acceptance of what constitutes best practice, fundamentally informed CDI’s Community Safety Initiative.