Under the scheme, community representatives, professionals working in the area and senior managers responsible for services come together to identify the main social problems where they live.
Participants are given training and then design an action plan. The community leaders try to address the problems identified by improving existing local services or by introducing new ones.
The Joseph Rowntree Trust funded a five-year trial of the scheme in the UK between 1998 and 2003 before the UK licence for the programme was awarded to the charity Rainer in 2006. Rainer, which has since been renamed as Catch22, ran the programme in a number of local authority areas until 2008.
The programme has been highly successful in the US, where studies show that it has led to a 25 per cent reduction in teenage delinquency. But research published in 2004 by the University of Sheffield into the first three years of the UK trial concluded that it was difficult to measure the impact the programme had on risk and protection.
Chris Wright, chief operating officer at Catch22, said that the charity was planning to relaunch the programme as a result of the government commitment to early intervention.
"Of late, we’ve not been able to interest anyone in funding it but we’ve been looking at how we can revise it and go back out to the market again," he said. "We think that it’s really timely with Graham Allen’s early intervention review and the focus on evidence-based methodology."
The charity is currently working with the Social Research Unit to update the programme.
