Learning from Others' Experiences Posted on November 15, 2011 Richard Edwards notes that the 2011 GIC offered an opportunity to learn about other people's successes and challenges with different implementation approaches.

There's a lot of emphasis on evidence-based practices. There's a lot of sort of even legislative mandates for the use of evidence-based practices, but there's not a lot of allowance for what it really takes to get those services up and running in an intentional way that maintains integrity and fidelity to the original model. And so when I heard about this conference, that's part of my interest in coming.

There's a lot of discussion around the need for evidence-based practice, but in terms of how you really get it off the ground and how you do it the right way with integrity to the original model to where you're actually getting the impact that you were hoping that you were going to get, for me, required the opportunity for me to talk to other folks that were already doing that, that had experience doing it this way or that had done this on a large scale.

And we have evidence-based practices, but our experience with starting them up has been largely trial and error, and we've been kind of learning this as we go, and the things that we've failed at have hopefully informed what we do in the future, but we don't really have time or money to learn by our mistakes over and over again. We really need to learn from other people's mistakes, and there are enough people out there doing it that this presented an opportunity for me to come together and learn from other folks that were doing it, as opposed to having just sort of learn it myself over time.