Question: Community Intervention
As the Director of Human Services in your community, you have been appointed Chair of a committee that must propose a well-rounded set of community prevention services. The other members of the committee are leaders of various social service agencies and community representatives. Choose a set of programs that you can justify to the rest of the committee and to members of the community. However, you must include at least one program for each area (pre-kindergarten education, child welfare / home visitation, youth development, mentoring, youth substance abuse, teen pregnancy, and juvenile offender programs). You should also include programs that serve youth from early childhood through adolescence.
Assignment
First, choose a combination of programs that address the full range of community needs while staying within your budget. Use the costs and benefits information and program descriptions contained in the Aos et al. (2004) article. Use the spreadsheet provided to keep track of your choices and how much money is being spent. Identify where on the intervention spectrum each program falls (universal, selected, indicated), as well as the number of people that will be served by each program, and the total costs and benefits of each program. When you enter the number of people who will get a program, as well as the cost per person and benefits per person, then the total will be calculated automatically for you).
Second, justify your prevention strategy and proposed programs in a brief report (2-3 pages) that you must submit to the City Council. Based on your report, the Council will decide whether or not to fund your efforts. For this report, you should strive to convince the Council:
How the community will benefit from this investment
How the needs of all community members are being met (poor & affluent; low-risk & high-risk; various ethnic groups)
Why you are spending more money on some programs than on others
Why some programs are being offered to only some members of the community and how you would select those individuals
Why you chose more than one program for some problem areas and why you omitted some well-known or popular programs.
In your justification, you should draw upon any ideas or material from the semester to make the best case possible for your proposal.
Format
Create a cover page that includes basic identifying information. The paper should be 2-3 double-spaced pages long. Please use 12pt Times or Times New Roman font with 1" margins on all sides. You will also submit your completed spreadsheet showing the names and types (universal, selected, indicated) of programs you selected, number of people served and total costs and benefits.
References
On a separate page at the end of your paper, please include a References page. It should include any sources that you cite in your paper.
Community Details for Paper #3
Budget: $4, 500, 000
City demographics:
Population: 110,000
1500 children of each age (e.g., 1500 youth who are 3 years old; 1500 youth who are 7 years old)
20% Poverty rate (i.e., 300 children in each grade are below the poverty line)
125 infants born to poor, young, first-time moms each year
100 children (from 80 families) in Foster Care
200 youth per grade from ages 12-18 with a history of juvenile delinquency (i.e., a total of 1400 adolescent youth in your community with a history of juvenile delinquency)
900 youth in the community experiment with cigarettes and/or alcohol each year
50% White; 30% African-American; 10% Hispanic, 7% Asian, 3% Native American
Suggestions for Paper #3
This is the third paper of the semester, and your writing / ideas should reflect this. Vague ideas that you could have written about before you took this class will receive little credit.
Include in-text citations in the paper to indicate where you got your information from. At the very least, you should have references to the Aos et al., 2004 article. Remember: part of your grade for this paper comes from using class materials to help justify your answers.
Be specific about how the community will benefit from their investment in your plan. You are asked to include both the benefits to the youth as well as the financial benefits to the community.
Example: Too vague: "The community will benefit because everyone in the community will be healthy and will be benefited. The community will save lots of money with this budget."
Example: More specific: "By investing in this budget, the community will save a large amount of money. By investing $5.5 million, the community will gain over $15 million in benefits. For example, although the Nurse Family Partnership program costs $9,118 per person to implement, the benefit is over $26,000 per person, which means that for every dollar invested, there is a return of almost $3 (Aos et al., 2004). This program will provide services for the 100 young, low-income, first-time mothers in this community, and in the long-term will improve the children's health and academic readiness, and reduce child abuse and delinquency (Johnson, 2008)."
Remember, just because a program sounds good when you read the description does not mean that it works or that it is cost-effective. A program with benefit = $0 has no effect. A program with a benefit that is smaller than the cost will be very hard to support.
There are 150 youth per year between the ages of 12 and 18 (i.e., 1050 youth total) who engage in delinquency or juvenile offending. Services for these youth are expensive and it may be hard to serve all of them. If you cannot serve everyone, explain why you can't serve everyone and explain how you will choose the individuals who will be in your program.
There are 300 low-income youth at every age, so that means that there are 300 3-year olds and 300 4-year olds in the community.
You may want to consider organizing your paper with 1-2 paragraphs per question in the assignment description. This will help you make sure that you have answered all of the questions that are required
Article - BENEFITS AND COSTS OF PREVENTION AND EARLY INTERVENTION PROGRAMS FOR YOUTH
Attachment:- budget worksheet.xlsx