This document provides practical guidance on planning for and maintaining the long-term continuation of evidence-based prevention programs in community settings. It explains why sustainability matters for lasting public health impact, outlines key factors and strategies that support sustained implementation (such as leadership support, ongoing funding, and integration into existing systems), and offers tools for assessing and strengthening a program’s capacity to endure beyond initial implementation. This guidance helps implementation teams move from project start-up to durable practice that continues to benefit communities over time.
Category: Understanding How a Program Works
Program Budgeting
The Prevention Learning Portal offers an eLearning course that helps you get ready to start a new prevention program. The course provides a Program Budget Template that you can use to calculate the program’s total estimated costs, actual costs, and the difference between the two. The Program Budget Template is available to you here in the PLP eLibrary as a downloadable Excel tool. You are encouraged to also take the Program Readiness eCourse to help you in your additional efforts to launch your new program.
Theory of Change: Understanding Program Goals and Outcomes
This one-page resource defines a theory of change as the rationale for why prevention activities, services, events, or products should lead to desired outcomes, and notes that theories of change often inform program design and logic models. It briefly describes several common public health theories used for behavior change—such as the Theory of Planned Behavior, Transtheoretical (Stages of Change) Model, Ecological Model, Social Cognitive Theory, and the Health Belief Model. It also emphasizes that selecting an appropriate theory can require domain expertise and recommends consulting a research partner when needed.
Using Logic Models to Strengthen Programs from Start to Finish
Create an account with The Pennsylvania State University Prevention Learning Portal and earn completion certificates for several prevention topics. This resource explains how a logic model helps clarify a program’s goals, articulate how and why it works, and identify why desired outcomes may or may not be occurring at different stages of planning, implementation, or reflection. It describes the logic model as a guiding framework that visually links program activities to intended goals and outcomes, serving as a practical roadmap for program success.
Logic Model Template
This document is a logic model template designed to help teams plan and describe how a program is intended to work by outlining its resources (inputs), activities/outputs, short-term outcomes, and long-term impacts, and encouraging clear specification of the program theory of change and dosage. It serves as a practical tool for guiding program planning, implementation, communication, and evaluation by visually linking what a program invests and does to the results it aims to achieve.