Overview: Trends in Organized Efforts to Conduct and Evaluate Healthy Eating and Obesity Prevention Interventions in Low-Resource Communities

Introduction:  Traditional health promotion aims to enable and empower communities to overcome health barriers through community organizing, building capacity (empowerment), and supporting community members because residents can best identify their community’s needs, influence peers, and effect permanent change.  Early evaluation approach was rudimentary and poorly formalized. Communities were funded to do what they thought best, but results were often unclear, slow or unsustainable.

Approach:  As evaluation processes matured and emphasis on evidence based intervention evaluation began driving program options. CDC and USDA asked for increasingly far-reaching but prescriptive results. Meanwhile, experts recommended comprehensive, multi-component, large-scale approaches. Emphasis on multiple spheres of influence, ‘root causes’, and networks of public, non-profit, philanthropic and business stakeholders, like the Partnership for a Healthy America, emerged.  Breakthrough concepts like Collective Impact— common agendas, shared metrics, coordinated activities, deep partnerships, continuous communication, and long-term commitment—challenge traditional evaluation and hold promise to address complex challenges.

Results:  The mix of approaches, infrastructures and funding called for by CDC’s signature chronic disease prevention programs, USDA’s 16 food assistance programs, and the Congressional directive for SNAP-Ed and CDC to coordinate have the potential for significant impact, especially in harmony with philanthropic and private-sector initiatives.  PSEs added to nutrition education and social marketing allow a more powerful set of SNAP-Ed interventions. Further results will be included in presentations to follow.

Discussion: Low-resource communities require coordinated, intentional programs and strategies. Leaders who understand how to capture and measure the newly available synergies can fill gaps and significantly accelerate positive change.