Supporting community-based organisations’ use of evidence is an effective way to link research to action in health programmes. One approach to this work is to develop a strategy of community-based knowledge transfer and exchange to facilitate the use of research evidence in service planning and delivery.

Researchers working on this topic have identified a number of activities that are key to the success of these strategies: fostering a culture favourable to the use of research evidence and which recognises its importance in decision-making; providing evidence that is directly relevant to the work of community-based organisations; supporting activities that link research evidence to action; and, evaluating these efforts.

Community-based organisations have a key role in implementing the actions in Reducing harm, supporting recovery. In fulfilling this role, they will need support in finding, selecting and using evidence in decision-making and implementing the findings of research in service delivery and advocacy work. One obstacle to increasing the effective use of evidence in non-governmental, voluntary and community-based services has been the lack of material tailored to the needs of these stakeholders and providing clearly written, accessible and persuasive guidance on identifying and implementing research findings. There has been substantial improvement in this area in recent years. In the United Kingdom, the third sector supports a number of organisations who specialise in guiding organisations through the steps of evidence-based decision making, and the volume of literature supporting this work has grown substantially over the past few years.

In this issue, we highlight a new resource published by the EMCDDA which provides services with an excellent introduction for anyone attempting to understand the role that research evidence can play in making their work more effective, sustainable and impactful. The resource, Health and social responses to drug problems: a European guide aims to encourage a way of thinking around how to respond to particular problems in particular settings. It provides a brief overview of current knowledge on a number of significant drug-related issues and attempts to answer what we know already about the issue, what works, and what can be done to respond to it. The guide is supported by an online platform on the EMCDDA’s best practice portal. It is a companion document to the EMCDDA’s report on the drugs market. The two documents complement each other and represent significant progress in the work of building an informed, empowered and confident community response to problem drug use.