Recruiting Communities Posted on March 19, 2007 Robert Saltz (bio) talks about how interventionists can get community buy-in.

So in terms of disseminating information, how do you mobilize people, it depends on who it is you're trying to get along in the intervention. In the university project, for instance, I'm currently engaged with, you have university administrators who have a whole different sort of approach to this problem than say neighborhood associations who are highly activated, very interested in this, and I think the challenge for interventions is to find a meaningful role for any of those groups and the kind of information and the kind of data you share with them can be the same but neighbors, for instance, don't need a lot of data to convince them there's a problem. They're right out there, you know, complaining about it.

So what they want to do, though, is be convinced that to any extent they're going to be engaged, that it's going to be worth their time. So somehow, you have to present them with things such as the fact that there really is evidence behind the interventions that you're suggesting; something that would persuade them that this isn't just something else that they might have done before that's just gonna fade out.

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