Developmental prevention involves intervening early before crime or serious behavioral problems emerge or become entrenched, modifying social arrangements through the organized provision of resources to individuals, families, schools, or communities. Persuasive scientific evidence suggests that this approach works, based primarily on a range of studies that commenced in the United States before the 1980s, such as the Perry Preschool Project (enriched preschool for disadvantaged children) and the Elmira Prenatal/Early Infancy Project (nurse home visiting to support pregnant, single teenage women). Pathways to Prevention is a program of research on developmental prevention that began in 1997 with work by the Developmental Crime Prevention Consortium that reviewed the international evidence on the effectiveness of this approach and assessed its policy implications for Australia. The consortium identified a huge range of creative initiatives that collectively held great promise, but they found that relatively few of these initiatives were well evaluated. They concluded that it was time to invest in one or more demonstration projects to develop a local body of scientific knowledge about how to execute developmental prevention systematically in Australian conditions, especially in disadvantaged communities where needs are most concentrated. The Pathways to Prevention Project (Pathways) in Brisbane is implementing these recommendations in one of the most disadvantaged urban areas of Queensland, based on a strong foundation of ongoing research.