Evaluation of the Healthy and Active Communities (H&AC) initiative

The Missouri Foundation for Health's H&AC Initiative is designed around four goals seeking to prevent obesity by encouraging communities to become more healthy and active. The H&AC Initiative funded selected communities in Missouri to implement a variety of programs through organizations in diverse communities. Unfortunately, few models exist on how to evaluate a multi-site, multi-program obesity prevention initiative.

No other attempt has been made to evaluate a large-scale obesity prevention effort implemented by multiple actors that includes not only problem-targeted programs, but also advocacy and collaborative efforts to change policy. The evaluators drew upon multiple literature bases to develop an evaluation plan because of the challenges of conducting an evaluation involving multiple sites implementing different interventions through a variety of organizations. The developed plan drew heavily from the Kellogg Foundation's cluster evaluation approach but other techniques were considered. The evaluation plan focused on whether or not the H&AC initiative achieved its four goals by assessing the scope of the problem, community capacity, organizational capacity, and client impact. Data collection methods included interviews with grantee staff, key informant interviews, grantee/project site visits, focus groups, web surveys, secondary data, and telephone surveys. Preliminary results and lessons learned from the first 18 months of the project will be presented with specific attention paid to the development of the evaluation method.