History
Built through practice. Expanding for what comes next.
The Center for Behavior and Systems Innovation grows from more than two decades of HANDS in Autism® work to move evidence into everyday practice. CBSI carries that experience forward while creating a broader platform for behavioral, educational, workforce, organizational, and systems change.
Explore the HANDS HistoryOur Foundation
A trajectory established through HANDS
HANDS began in 2004 with a practical challenge: how could research-supported practices become useful, teachable, and sustainable in the settings where people live, learn, work, and receive services? Over time, the HANDS team built and refined a comprehensive training curriculum, hands-on learning model, consultation and coaching supports, demonstration partnerships, community networks, and a research-to-practice infrastructure. The work remained grounded in autism and disability while generating lessons about workforce preparation, implementation, cross-agency collaboration, and local capacity that travel across settings and systems.
Read the full HANDS history and philosophy →A Selective Trajectory
The milestones below show how the work developed toward CBSI.
This page shows a selective trajectory. View the full HANDS timeline, including individual projects and partnerships, on the HANDS website.
| Years | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2004–2009 | Build and test: HANDS established its team, training environment, comprehensive curriculum, consultation model, community outreach, and early school, healthcare, and international collaborations. |
| 2010–2013 | Extend learning and local capacity: Virtual learning, online resources, Local Community Cadres, train-the-trainer approaches, and broader medical and community partnerships created more ways to learn and sustain practice. |
| 2014–2018 | Connect programs and systems: Statewide, interagency, research, employment, and international initiatives expanded the work beyond individual training toward coordinated implementation and system support. |
| 2019–2025 | Strengthen a tiered research-to-practice platform: Intensive and virtual training, ECHO and mentoring networks, behavioral health and workforce initiatives, community engagement, measures, and implementation supports created multiple entry points for partners. |
| 2026 & Beyond | Advance through CBSI: CBSI provides a center-wide home for extending this tested foundation to broader questions across education, behavioral health, healthcare, workplaces, public systems, and communities while HANDS continues as a signature model and initiative. |
Why CBSI Now
The needs brought to HANDS increasingly cross program, organization, and sector boundaries. A challenge first noticed in a classroom may also involve behavioral health, workforce preparation, family and community supports, leadership, data, funding, or coordination across agencies. CBSI is the next step in this trajectory: a structure for bringing applied research, training, facilitation, implementation support, mentoring, and systems improvement together around challenges that cannot be solved by one program or discipline alone.
What Continues
- The comprehensive HANDS curriculum, framework, training process, tools, and recognizable identity
- Hands-on learning through instruction, modeling, practice, feedback, coaching, and mentoring
- Individualized selection and combination of evidence-based practices based on strengths, goals, data, culture, setting, and response
- Partnership with individuals, families, practitioners, organizations, and communities
- A commitment to building local skill, leadership, ownership, and sustainable capacity
What CBSI Expands
- A broader interdisciplinary home for behavioral, educational, workforce, organizational, and systems questions
- Shared infrastructure for applied research, evaluation, engagement, training, facilitation, mentoring, and implementation
- Connections across general and special education, disability and autism services, behavioral health, healthcare, employment, workplaces, public systems, and community settings
- The ability to adapt and responsibly extend tested approaches while studying what works, for whom, under what conditions, and what is needed to sustain it
The Next Step
Agile, responsive, and systematic
CBSI can adjust the form, pace, and setting of support as partner needs change while preserving the essential features that make an approach effective. Work begins with the people closest to the issue, considers readiness and local context, and proceeds through clear phases of exploration, preparation, early use, improvement, and sustainability. This balance allows the Center to respond without becoming fragmented and to scale without losing quality, relationships, or learning.
See Our Approach