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Update on Blueprints Future
I am writing with an important update about the future of Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development. As we announced last March, Blueprints’ external funding recently concluded and, despite intensive fundraising efforts over the past two years, no external or internal funding sources are presently available for Blueprints to continue “operating as usual” at its founding institutional home at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Behavioral Science. At this juncture, I assessed scenarios with input from our scientific advisory board and staff and decided to put Blueprints into dormancy until it is possible to secure a sustainable, high-impact path forward.
The dormancy process entails updating information on the existing programs listed on our website and ensuring that Blueprints will remain freely available and searchable while in dormancy. This process will be completed by June 2025.
As we put Blueprints into dormancy, we are reflecting on Blueprints’ value to the field going forward and priorities for a new potential home with a diversified funding base to not only sustain our operations but also grow while remaining a trusted source for finding information on evidence-based prevention programs for youth. This planning will allow Blueprints to emerge from dormancy in a position of strength when the conditions are right.
To inform this planning, I would value your feedback on how Blueprints has aided your work; I’d be grateful if you could take a couple of minutes to complete this brief survey.
The Legacy and Promise of Blueprints
Since its inception, Blueprints has been a leading source of innovation in the field of evidence-based decision making, a process that uses data and rigorous research findings, practitioner expertise, and community preferences to make decisions about how to support positive outcomes for individuals, families, communities, and society.
When Blueprints was launched in 1996, decisions to adopt policy and programmatic interventions were made largely without the benefit of research on their effectiveness. Blueprints was one of the earliest efforts to establish a clear scientific standard for evaluating the evidence of a program’s effectiveness, implementing a rigorous expert review process, and certifying those programs that met this standard. You can read more about Blueprints’ history on the Blueprints website.
Blueprints has long been at the forefront of efforts to advance standards for using rigorous procedures to evaluate interventions and to provide communities, schools, policymakers, and funders with valuable and trustworthy information to aid in their decision making. As of 2024, Blueprints has gathered and publicly organized a wealth of information on the evidence base underlying nearly 1,600 interventions aimed at supporting healthy youth development. This evidence can be used by decision makers to inform program adoption and analyzed collectively to guide directions for new research, innovation, and development (e.g., Buckley et al., 2020, 2021, 2023, 2024). Additional examples of Blueprints’ reach domestically and internationally can be found in the last Blueprints newsletter.
Today, we sit at an important crossroads for evidence-based decision making. The demands on online clearinghouses are greater than ever. Blueprints and the dozens of other clearinghouses launched after Blueprints must help entire fields—from public health and child welfare to education and labor/employment—track an increasingly voluminous and scientifically complex literature on the effectiveness of policy and programmatic interventions for infants, children, adolescents, young adults, seniors, families, and communities. They perform a critical function to evaluate the available evidence in terms of its rigor and relevance, given the wide range of types and quality of studies and the limited time and expertise of decision makers to assess and synthesize individual studies.
Clearinghouses are also now being called upon by community members and practitioners to expand the evidence they review and synthesize beyond their initial focus primarily on evidence from experimental studies. This development follows growing recognition of the importance of multiple forms of evidence for understanding what works, for whom, and under what conditions—and the myriad sources of innovation emerging from within communities, especially those that have long been marginalized and under-resourced.
At the same time, online clearinghouses need to evolve functionally to deliver on their purpose. Clearinghouses are not widely understood since few people (especially in practice and policy) frequently or consistently use them. Moreover, passively summarizing evaluation evidence is insufficient for communities, policymakers, and other decision makers to implement solutions that achieve population impacts.
A report by The Bridgespan Group identified multiple gaps in evidence-based decision making, including comprehensiveness of the evidence being reviewed and presented; information on implementation; guidance and support on selecting and planning to implement interventions; synthesis of findings and best practices that can inform decision making; improved usability of evidence reviews; and awareness that allows decision makers to search for and receive information efficiently and effectively. Along with other essential aspects of the evidence ecosystem, clearinghouses must evolve to address these gaps. In this context, Blueprints has the potential to extend its legacy of innovation by leveraging new technologies and more transparent, equity-centered approaches to both better meet users’ needs for a more complete body of evidence on how to support young people’s thriving while continuing to be a leader in advancing evidence-based decision making more broadly.
For example, new protocols for more efficiently reviewing a wider landscape of evidence with culturally attuned lenses combined with integrated artificial intelligence (AI) tools proposed by Blueprints and the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives can make it easier for users to select evidence-based interventions that map to the expressed needs of diverse communities. Blueprints could also provide users with AI-facilitated guidance to meet community assessment and implementation needs using well-tested operational protocols that ensure feasibility, fidelity, acceptability, cultural relevance, and sustainability of evidence-based interventions in a given community. Blueprints would expand on its strategic partnerships to provide input into these processes, helping Blueprints to continue to learn from the field while more deeply embedding it as a trusted resource in the social networks of communities, schools, government agencies, funders, and policymakers.
Next Steps
With the support of Blueprints’ scientific advisory board, I am leading an effort in the coming months to lay the foundation for seeking new funding sources and an institutional home that will allow Blueprints to emerge from dormancy in a way that we can deliver on the promise outlined above in the years ahead.
Thank you for your partnership over the past 28 years; your engagement and feedback have been essential to Blueprints’ growth, influence, and success.
Please reach out to me directly if you have any questions or ideas as we develop plans to exit dormancy when we find a home and mix of funding sources that are aligned with the values and forward-looking potential of this important field resource.
Sincerely,
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