At the annual Jail Diversion and Trauma Recovery – Priority to Veterans (JDTR) grantee meeting this year, each grantee site gave a brief report on their sustainability efforts. As expected, sites varied in terms of their challenges and successes, yet one observation became clear: the sites needed something innovative in their toolkits to kick their sustainability efforts to the next level. For those programs that were doing well, they needed something other than “keep doing what you are doing.” In the disruptive environment in which we operate, it is not necessarily credible to think that continuing to do what we have been doing will continue to yield success. This is true not only in the sense of avoiding threats, but also, if not more importantly, in being able to take rapid advantage of opportunities. Conversely, for those sites that were struggling with sustainability, continuing to trudge down the tried and true path – while relevant as it is to what we know to do – may place them on a road requiring unanticipated construction before being able to go full speed into the various sustainability scenarios in which sites operate. Considering these things, we now introduce Sustainability 2.0.
Sustainability 2.0 has three basic premises:
- First, the data (successes, failures, and all points in-between) collected and outcomes achieved by program sites are of interest to the wider citizenry. Sites do not know the full picture of who those people are, where they are located, or why they would be interested. If they could be reached, however, it is plausible to believe some of them would play a role in sustainability.
- Second, thanks to the internet in general and social media in particular, programs have available to them methods by which to get their data in front of not just this larger audience but specifically their best audience (i.e., the audience most likely to support your program). We have never lived in a time when the ability to make connections with others has been so easy, fast, and