Youth Can! Grow Healthy: A positive youth development program to empower young adolescents

The purpose of this presentation is to describe an after-school, positive youth development and gardening program, which used youth-led participatory action research with a Photovoice methodology to assess the community's food and physical activity environments. This novel pilot project targeted young adolescents to advocate for healthier community environments, to increase their self-efficacy for healthy dietary and physical activity behaviors, and to improve their level of school connectedness. The program was implemented in collaboration with University of Tennessee (UT) researchers, UT Extension agents, Beardsley Farm, an urban demonstration farm, and a local school district's Coordinated School Health Program. A quasi-experimental pre- and post-test design was used. A convenience sample was recruited from the intervention and comparison schools. Baseline data at the intervention school revealed that that 81% (9/11) of students in the program had an age- and gender-specific BMI ≥95th percentile. Preliminary results showed that on the day prior to survey administration, 53% of students ate vegetables ≤ 1 time and 61% ate fruit ≤ 1 time. Photovoice assessment results will be shown and comparison data will be presented to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention. The results of this pilot project are important to the advancement of youth development programs that empower students to be agents of change to improve their food and physical activity environments in their communities and schools. Further, the areas of youth development and youth-led participatory action research can inform all health promotion programs on ways to increase effectiveness in behavior change.