In: Journal of community practice: organizing, planning, development, and change sponsored by the Association for Community Organization and Social Administration (ACOSA), Band 18, Heft 2-3, S. 267-279
The community of Huntington, an Appalachian city in West Virginia with the highest overdose rate in the nation, participated as an Innovation Community in a grant funded Community Assessment and Education to Promote Behavioral Health Planning and Evaluation (CAPE II) project. Activities entailed designing and implementing an innovative, replicable, and sustainable early warning protocol that addressed a locally determined set of community behavioral health issues. Using 192 publicly available indicators tracked for a year throughout 12 geographic neighborhoods, the authors developed an early warning system and analyzed relationships between key indicators and substance overdose and arrests. Community interventions were designed to address these relationships from the perspective of social workers, law enforcement officers, and community members.