ECHO Curriculum Background

The Challenge

There is compelling evidence that cognitive behavioral interventions (CBI) are among the most effective interventions to improve opportunities for school-aged youth. CBI has been shown to drastically reduce young people’s involvement in the criminal legal system, keep them safe from gun violence, increase school engagement, and alleviate mental health conditions. These powerful interventions could stop the onslaught of what have been called “deaths of decision-making” that plague teenagers all around the world – violence, suicide, and overdose among them. Given the broad evidence base for these tools, why aren’t they more universally available and delivered? 

One challenge is that while some community-based organizations (CBOs) do offer mental health services, many may not have a clinician on staff who can deliver such services and may be otherwise limited in resources to adopt resource-intensive programming.  Consequently, they are less likely to adopt and scale these evidence-based but resource -intensive interventions, despite their potential.  But what if instead of adopting a whole new program, CBOs were able to take their existing programming and human capital infrastructure and just deliver the kind of skill building that really matters?  

The Opportunity

To address this challenge, the University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab has worked with community-based practitioners and violence prevention experts to develop an open-source, evidence-informed decision-making curriculum designed for and with young people. The ECHO curriculum (Every Choice Has Opportunity) was designed for young people ages 13–21 who may have limited connection to school or work and/or be at risk of involvement in gun violence. Many of the skills are also relevant and transferable to other groups, including adolescents more broadly and older adults at high risk for violence. 

The goal is to make the curriculum and accompanying implementation manual available to any youth-serving organization worldwide such that they could easily access and incorporate the skill-building lessons into their existing mentoring or school-based violence-prevention programming free of charge. At the heart of this work is the idea that while many organizations might be able to identify, engage and serve participants with a variety of programming, they might not always be focused on the specific kinds of skill building activities that are connected to improving participants’ long-term well-being.  

The Design Process

The University of Chicago Crime Lab and Education Lab convened twelve Chicago community-based behavioral health experts for a 9-month “design table” that convened to develop the ECHO curriculum. The individuals on the design table represented the following organizations: Breakthrough, Brightpoint, CRED, Enlace, the Institute for Nonviolence, Metropolitan Peace Initiatives, Noble Schools, Roca, UCAN, Youth Advocate Programs, Youth Guidance, and the Youth Peace Center of Roseland. Members met monthly to determine what skills the curriculum should prioritize, how to teach them, and how to reinforce them with examples and exercises.  

A Youth Advisory Council, comprised of 13 young people with similar experiences to ECHO’s intended audience, then vetted the modules to ensure they were relevant and engaging. These individuals met with the University of Chicago team met monthly over the course of 6 months, walking through curriculum content and providing their feedback on each module. 

This iterative design cycle resulted in a curriculum that focused on 20 skills that could be delivered in three different modalities: 1) a sequenced, group-based application, 2) a drop-in group-based application, or 3) a 5-minute quick connect.  The curriculum offers flexible materials that focus on the skills most central to keeping young people safe from violence and productively engaged in school. The program manual has been designed to simply plug in high-quality CBI to existing programming tailored to young people aged 13-21 with tenuous connections to school and elevated risk for violence involvement or other harmful behaviors. (It should be noted that while ECHO has been developed from practitioners working in evidence-based programs, the curriculum content has not been tested itself.) 

As the ECHO curriculum neared completion, we worked with our design table partners willing to run pilots of the program modules. In these pilots, partner organizations used the ECHO curriculum as a complement to their existing programs serving youth and their families. Within each pilot, the curriculum was delivered by the same staff who normally lead programming, whether they were licensed clinicians, outreach workers, or other staff. Feedback from these pilots were then incorporated into the curriculum and implementation manual.