Community coalitions are a strategy to coordinate activities and resources to prevent adolescent substance use and delinquent behaviour. They can help mobilise communities in prevention and health promotion initiatives.

The Communities That Care (CTC) approach sets out to reduce adolescent health and behaviour problems. It does so by identifying strong risk factors and weak protective factors experienced by this group and then selecting tested and effective prevention and early intervention programmes to address them.

In this EMCDDA Paper we make an analysis of five studies evaluating the effectiveness of CTC, mainly from outside the EU. The results of our analysis lead us to conclude that further investigation of this prevention model within the European context appears to be merited.