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Menominee Journey to Wellness: Leveraging Community-Academic Partnership to Prevent Obesity through Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change
Methods:Partnership efforts over 15 years include epidemiologic surveys, 2 NIH-funded randomized-controlled early childhood healthy lifestyle interventions, and numerous community interventions. A multi-sector Community Engagement Workgroup was formed to address obesity and other child health issues. The partnership developed the Menominee Broken Hoop Model to facilitate community understanding of how historic and current trauma, adverse childhood events, and unhealthy coping mechanisms contribute to poor health.
Results: PSE changes include improved school and worksite nutrition policies, open gym, development of community gardens, and increased availability of healthy foods. The collaboration has also built infrastructure for long-term planning, implementation, and evaluation of community health initiatives. This includes a comprehensive child obesity surveillance system including anthropometric , demographic, and behavior measures collected at Head Start, WIC clinics, schools, and the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. In addition, the models conceptualizing the impact of trauma on community health facilitated alignment of diverse community health initiatives around underlying social determinants of health.
Conclusion: This long-term community-academic partnership has worked within broad community engagement to promote policy, systems, and environmental changes to reduce childhood obesity in the Menominee community. This has built strong infrastructure for the community to address additional health issues in the future and may serve as a model for other Tribal communities.
Learning Areas:
Chronic disease management and preventionDiversity and culture
Public health or related research
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health
Learning Objectives:
Describe the outcomes of community-academic partnership in building infrastructure and promoting policy, systems, and environmental change for obesity prevention
Identify key elements for sustaining equitable, long-term community-academic partnerships in tribal communities
Discuss how the synthesis of local community engagement and community-based research may facilitate the development of broad community-driven health initiatives
Keyword(s): Native Americans, Obesity
Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am a public health professional based in a Wisconsin tribal community working to build community capacity for epidemiology, program planning, and evaluation of broad community health initiatives. My focus areas include chronic disease prevention, behavioral health,community engagement and collective impact, and social determinants of health. I have also collaborated closely with researchers on a number of community-academic partnership research projects and grants.
Any relevant financial relationships? No
I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.