About Us
Who we are
The Active Implementation Research Network® (AIRN) was established to advance implementation practice, research, and policy, and to support the development of implementation science as both a field and a profession. It carries forward the influential work conducted under the umbrella of the National Implementation Research Network (NIRN), created by Dean Fixsen and Karen Blase in 2002.
Our mission
To close the gap between science and service by improving the science and practice of implementation for evidence-based and evidence-informed programs and practices.
AIRN is dedicated to…
1. Advancing the Science of Implementation
- Engaging with organizations, systems, and communities to achieve socially significant improvements.
- Guiding organizational leaders to establish ‘Implementation Teams’ to provide internal capacity to deliver and sustain ever-improving outcomes.
- Informing and conducting implementation research and evaluation.
- Promoting common language and understanding related to effective implementation.
2. Facilitating Transformation Across Health, Education, and Other Human Services
- Bridging the implementation gap between policymakers and service providers, funders and local ambition, and evidence-based aspirations and socially significant outcomes.
- Providing practical implementation guidance, informed by the best available evidence and real-world experience, to transform service delivery and practice.
- Designing and delivering timely, tailored, and effective guidance and skill-building to governments, communities, and individual agencies that are implementing evidence-based programs and practices.
3. Ensuring the Experiences of Diverse Communities Inform Implementation Efforts
- Collaborating with community-based and community-inspired efforts.
- Adapting or creating relevant, responsive approaches to complex and urgent challenges.
- Elevating diverse perspectives to ensure implementation is equitable and locally meaningful.
Our values
AIRN works alongside organizational leaders to equip their workforces to provide consistently high-quality services that produce measurable and meaningful benefits to those they serve.
Our practice principles are:
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Be intentional to enhance learning.
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Work collaboratively with each other and with our partners; the result will be better if multiple perspectives are engaged.
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Lead with function; ensure form supports function.
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Actively support the capacity of others to provide Active Implementation support.
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Be proactive; attend to and enhance readiness and provide anticipatory guidance.
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Lean into the hard and often adaptive work of systems and culture change.
Our approach
Active Implementation is an integrated approach to implementation practice, science, and policy that has developed from practitioner-scientist activities since the late 1960s.
Our approach has its roots in the Teaching-Family Model, one of the first evidence-based programs. The research-to-practice and practice-to-research cycles from this work established the evidence for strong variables that now form the Active Implementation Frameworks™.
