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The Division of Adolescent and School Health, Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, Centers for Disease Control has responsibility for assisting national, state, and local education agencies to provide effective HIV education for youth. In fall 1987, 14 state and 9 local education agencies that serve areas with the highest cumulative incidence of AIDS cases convened to develop a common set of data items that could provide comparable information about HIV-related knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors among adolescents in their respective jurisdictions over time. Surveys were administered during spring 1988 to representative samples of adolescents in each participating state and city. These education agencies will use the results from this complementary system of school-based surveys as a guide in planning HIV education, setting program priorities, allocating resources, and monitoring changes in HIV-related knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors among adolescents.

Community health initiatives typically involve time-limited funding from foundation or government grants to support their initial activities. But if there are to be lasting improvements in health outcomes, initiative activities must be sustained over a relatively long period of time. Despite the importance of sustaining work begun under health initiatives, there have been few attempts to track sustainability after the period of funding has ended. This article provides a framework for evaluating the legacy of community health initiatives and illustrates its use with the legacy evaluation from The California Wellness Foundation’s Health Improvement Initiative (HII). The HII was largely successful in sustaining its core elements of collaborative partnerships, community-level systems changes, direct services, and population health measurement. The authors discuss differences in evaluation design and data collection between the funded-period and legacy evaluations; these differences may justify a distinct methodological approach.