Collaborative Evaluation Using a Community of Practice Model

Over the past decade, public health has moved upstream from direct service provision and health education campaigns to address the underlying social, environmental and economic determinants of health behaviors. This upstream focus has been embraced by advocates working to advance policies and improve environments that enable healthy eating and active living behaviors. However, this focus has presented challenges in evaluating policy and environmental change at the community level. Advocates, researchers and funders have realized that more sensitive measures of community change than those that traditional evaluation models typically provide are necessary to capture the progress that communities are making in creating healthier policies and environments.

This presentation shares lessons learned from a two-year “Community of Practice” evaluation project involving seven community coalitions in Oregon and southwest Washington advancing policy and environmental changes. This project – titled “Northwest Community Changes” – employed a collaborative model focusing on building coalition capacity to evaluate their process of policy change. Coalitions participated in skills-based workshops, peer-to-peer conference calls, a dedicated web site and tailored technical assistance. As a result, coalitions drafted strategy maps and evaluation plans that identified key milestones that were tracked to assess progress toward their desired policy change, as well as producing products to share their story with stakeholders. This approach has yielded important insights on how funders, local health departments and community-based organizations can work together to build a regional movement for healthy places, identify promising practices that can be shared with others, and distill key lessons from the field.