Implementing the SS/HS Initiative

The SS/HS Initiative requires that grantees implement all of the components of the five SS/HS elements, while also building shared ownership of these components with partners. Just implementing the initiative is an enormous task. But implementing the work on the “macro” level—ensuring cultural and linguistic competence, creating systems change, evaluating your initiative— is at least as ambitious.

This section will help guide you, your partners, and staff through everything you will do to:

• Implement the interventions, programs, and activities in your logic model
• Evaluate what you do
• Ensure that what you implement, the ways you evaluate, and your management structures and processes work well for everyone in your community, regardless of race, ethnicity, class, or other differences
• Develop shared leadership within a permanent partnership of education, mental health, juvenile justice, and law enforcement
• Create systems change
• Sustain your initiative’s positive outcomes

In addition, the Project Resource Guide provides guidance as you progress through these stages. During Year 2, technical assistance specialists also conduct site visits to support implementation.