General Information on the Target Cities Project

Target Cities is the national treatment demonstration program funded by the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of the Target Cities program is to improve systems and reduce fragmentation, lack of coordination and inefficiency among publicly funded treatment and associated service providers in cities with high alcohol and drug abuse prevalence.

Target Cities project typically presupposes establishing in each of the participating cities a Central Intake Unit (CIU) designed to be the single point of access for clients who experience substance dependency or abuse problems. CIUs provide standardized assessment and care management to the clients, referring them to providers of treatment, recovery, support and other services, i.e., perform client-treatment matching.

Target Cities is a demonstration project, and its outcomes are being carefully studied and evaluated. Enormous amounts of information describing the target population and the effects of the new system on treatment and rehabilitation results are being collected at  the participating sites. The research and evaluation component of the project is located at the University of Akron, where the so-called Cross-Site evaluation team, headed by Dr. Richard Stephens of the Department of Sociology, studies and analyzes the data collected by the sites.

Target Cities staff from all locations will find at this web site the news about developments in cross-site evaluation, formats of databases the cross-site team collects (codebooks), deadlines for the upcoming data dumps, technical instructions on data submission over e-mail (like file names and attachment formats), free software to download (like compression programs to compress the data before sending), and links to other Target Cities-related sites. It may be possible to build the virtual forum for evaluation results discussion in the future if the idea is supported.

Still more information on Target Cities Project is available at Cleveland's local Target City site – please visit them!

This page was last modified on December 04, 1998. 

Copyright Target Cities Research Project Cross-Site Team, 1998.
The views and opinions expressed in this page are responsibility of the page author(s). The contents of this page have not been reviewed by The University of Akron.
The content of this site has not been reviewed, approved or endorsed by the US Department of Health and Human Services or any its division.