A Purveyor
Role of Purveyor
A "purveyor" is an individual or group of individuals representing a program or practice who actively work to implement that practice or program with fidelity and good effect. Thus, in the examples from manufacturing and human services, the Toyota Supplier and Support Center (TSSC) is a purveyor of the Toyota Production Systems for manufacturing automobiles. MST Services, Inc. is the purveyor of the Multisystemic Therapy (MST) program for serious and chronic juvenile offenders. These are clear-cut examples of purveyors and each has a set of activities designed to help new organizations ("implementation sites") implement their respective programs.
In other cases, the "purveyor" is not so readily identified nor are the activities well described. For example, the Assertive Community Treatment program and the Wraparound approach seem to have several individuals who act as consultants to communities and agencies interested in adopting those programs. The Wraparound group has recognized the problem of multiple definitions of their approach being used by different purveyors and have formed a national association to develop a common definition of the approach and a common set of processes for assessing the fidelity of new implementation sites (Bruns, Suter, Leverentz-Brady, & Burchard, 2004).
Purveyor Activities
The literature is not always clear about the activities of a purveyor. For example, the Quantum Opportunity Program (Maxfield, Schirm, & Rodriguez-Planas, 2003) was implemented in several sites in a major, multi-state test of the program. The report of the findings simply noted that the originators of the program had received funding to provide technical assistance to the implementation sites. Given the uneven results, it is unfortunate that there was no link back to purveyor activities.
Nevertheless, in all of these instances, a purveyor works in more or less organized ways with the intention to implement a specified practice or program at a particular location. Over the years a purveyor also has been described as a “change agent” (Fairweather et al., 1974; Havelock & Havelock, 1973), "linking agent" (Kraft, Mezoff, Sogolow, Neumann, & Thomas, 2000), "program consultant" (Gendreau et al., 1999), and "site coordinator" (Blase et al., 1984).
