Bringing community health education to life in the classroom: Teaching program planning and evaluation to health education students through a competitive grant process

Community health education efforts often rely on the submission of a successful grant proposal. In an effort to familiarize health education students with this process while preparing them with needed skills, 17 students enrolled in a program planning and evaluation course competed against each other for funds from the college's health promotion office to implement and evaluate a health education program for the college population. The presentation will describe the project and learning outcomes in the context of the Responsibilities and Competencies of Health Educators. It will also describe the collaboration between the academic department and other college offices, the construction of an independent grants review panel, the review criteria applied to the grant proposals, and the funding mechanism. Finally, results of an anonymous survey of students and their perceptions of the effectiveness and usefulness of the approach, as well as their attitudes toward the approach will be presented.