Defining Sustainability

Author(s): Rebekah Hornak, Yolanda Perkins

Publication Date: March 2023

Core Competencies: Sustaining Change

Resource Type: Read

When you think about sustaining an evidence-based practice, what comes to mind?

We have been working through this ourselves at the SISEP Center. According to Rabin (2008), sustainability is:

“To what extent an evidence-based intervention can deliver its intended benefits over an extended period of time after external support from the donor agency is terminated.”

We get asked to define sustainability all of the time. What does it mean? What does it look like? What do we need to do to get this practice to be sustainable? So we thought, why not ask ChatGPT (an artificial intelligence chatbot)!