Building Community Health Promoter (CHP) capacity to promote heart health in Detroit: The Walk Your Heart to Health facilitation training

Walk Your Heart to Health (WYHH) is part of a multilevel, evidence-based intervention designed to promote racial, ethnic and socioeconomic health equity by supporting walking groups in low-to moderate-income predominantly African-American and Hispanic urban neighborhoods. WYHH is an 8 month Community-Health Promoter (CHP)-led walking group program based at faith- and community-based organizations, developed and implemented by the Healthy Environments Partnership using a community-based participatory research (CBPR) process. Intervention objectives include: promoting health equity through sustained walking, engaging community organizations in supporting walking group, and building community health promoter capacity to facilitate increased and ongoing physical activity.

Following a brief description of the WYHH program we will describe the extensive facilitation training that is provided to Community Health Promoters (CHPs) to enable them to effectively facilitate community walking groups. This training is designed to prepare CHPs to facilitate community efforts to support ongoing physical activity. The training covers the use and application of basic components of facilitation (e.g., emotional intelligence, reframing, rapport, group synergy, agreement, communication channels, tracking and pairing). The process involves the development of individual facilitation skills that includes personal leadership, teambuilding, and human growth and development among the CHPs. The process of coaching in facilitation, which focuses on evaluating and revising the performance of facilitators, that is used with the WYHH CHPs will be presented along with selected results from participant observation and feedback process used to identify ongoing facilitation training priorities.