The Duke Endowment launched its Child Abuse Prevention Initiative in 2002 by funding two program sites, the Durham Family Initiative in Durham, North Carolina, and Strong Communities in Greenville, South Carolina. Both sites aimed to reduce rates of child abuse, improve parenting practices and behaviors, strengthen community service systems, and improve a community's capacity to protect children and support parents. Chapin Hall was hired to be the cross-site evaluator tasked with documenting the extent to which each site is making progress toward these core objectives and providing a comparative analysis of the relative differences in each project's trajectory and potential for replication. The purpose of this report is to asses the initiative status after an initial 5 years of support. Although conceived as a decade-long endeavor, at this midpoint it is both appropriate and prudent to evaluate the extent to which each site has operationalized its theory of change and to determine whether measurable progress can be observed toward each of the initiative's core objectives. The initiative's ultimate or distal objectives may indeed require at least a decade to accomplish and to be embraced by the community in a manner that can assure sustainability. If the underlying theory has merit, however, one would expect to see some initial progress toward these objectives in the form of improved parental capacity, community support, and institutional change. This report addresses five primary questions: (1) Are the efforts underway in North and South Carolina preventing child maltreatment? (2) What can we say about how these changes were accomplished? (3) Which aspects of the initiative offer the greatest promise or opportunities for replication? (4) Can impacts be enhanced over time? and (5) Should the Child Abuse Prevention Initiative continue? Although these data are not perfect and not all trends are consistent within or across sites, the evidence gathered is sufficiently robust to provide initial answers to these core questions. (Contains 1 table.) [Funding was provided by The Duke Endowment, Rhett Mabry, and Toni Freeman.]