Background: Food insecure populations face chronic disease risk despite limited access to care. A regional coalition of stakeholders is addressing needs through food pantry intervention.
Methods: A comprehensive needs assessment of a rural multicounty region’s pantries was conducted. Feeding America’s Foods to Encourage guided objective assessment distributed foods’ nutritional quality. The proportion of nutrient-dense and nutrient-poor items were compared between sites based on pantry characteristics. This was combined with director surveys assessing inter-pantry coordination, capacity, and barriers while pantry recipients contributed individual needs and interest in supplemental programming. Critical unmet regional needs and areas of synergy between director and recipient interests will be identified and prioritized for coalition planning and implementation.
Results: State-funded pantries had significantly more items from nutrient-dense categories than did non-state-funded pantries (χ2=27.265, p<0.001), however, only 27% of items met all nutrient-dense qualifications. Initial pantry director (n=14) and recipient (n=122) data has been collected; remaining director and recipient data will be received in March 2019. Preliminary results reflect nutritionally-related chronic disease impacts 40.0% of recipients with 10.4% reporting multiple co-morbid conditions. Strong recipient interest in increased access to dairy, fresh produce, and meats contrasts with high availability of heavily processed carbohydrates and limited cold storage within pantries to support distribution of perishable items. Final analysis will be completed in the spring of 2019.
Conclusions: Full needs assessment findings be presented as they relate to best practices for chronic disease prevention. Coalition progress toward development of healthy local pantries (HELP) will facilitate pantry-based health intervention elsewhere.

This presentation will share important lessons learned from our committed, community-research-grandparent caregiver navigator partnership from our journey to develop, disseminate and deploy the Time for Me Toolkit, initially designed to address the gap in knowledge on diabetes self-care behaviors among grandparents and other relatives raising children and the personal and family impacts of opioid addiction on intergenerational caregiving. TFM uses a peer-driven, community-based participatory research design that purposefully utilizes ongoing feedback loops and collaborative engagement of cross-sector cross system stakeholders.

Guided by lessons learned from emergent findings, the partnership modified the TFM intervention to address the intersectionality of caregivers’ self-identity, sense of family, and self-care behaviors by:

• Normalizing the external and internal conflicts that arise from this complex dynamic.
• Utilizing an empowerment approach to foster caregivers’ self-compassion and inherent self-worth—independent of family care-giving behaviors—while concurrently framing self-care within the real-world context of self and family systems.
• Characterizing self-care as a learned skill that is part of a lifelong, ongoing process in which periods of challenges and growth are normal.

In response to peer-driven feedback, our partnership included a Small Change Approach, operationalized through SMART Goals, to educate and empower caregivers on the benefits of small changes to affect long-term change. According to peer navigators’ feedback, and process and data analysis, TFM’s self-compassion framework coupled with the Small Change Approach gave rise to a third emergent finding. This presentation will also allow time for discussion on evaluation results and replication of the toolkit and evidence based kinship navigator program.

Suicide is the 10th leading causes of death in the United States, and nearly 45,000 people ages 10 and older died by suicide in 2016. Notably, 54 percent of the people who died by suicide in 2016 had not been diagnosed with a serious mental illness. Research from the CDC has found that a variety of issues contribute to suicide risk factors, including interpersonal relationships, substance misuse, and work and financial stressors (CDC, 2018). As such, suicide prevention organizations are increasingly collaborating with local communities that can address these complex risk factors (i.e. medical organizations, police departments) for suicide prevention and mental health promotion activities.

To encourage increased engagement of communities in suicide prevention, the Suicide Prevention Resource Center convened a virtual Community of Practice (CoP) in 2018 for state and tribal organizations working with local communities to advance suicide prevention programming. Participants learned innovative strategies for building community capacity, utilizing data to inform the types and prioritization of community-based initiatives, and addressing specific challenges related to community-based suicide prevention programming. In the evaluation, CoP members reported a 15 percent statistically significant increase in knowledge of community-based topics explored during the CoP. Attending organizations also reported increased organizational capacity and progress toward achieving goals related to community suicide prevention.

In this session, presenters will review the key components for implementing suicide prevention in communities. They will then discuss innovative approaches used by CoP members to support community-based suicide prevention initiatives using these components, how states and tribes can support local community-based prevention work, and best practices in engaging community stakeholders.

background: Engaging rural communities in public health efforts can be challenging given limited resources and numerous competing priorities in these areas. Engagement may be particularly difficult when working in communities where researchers have no existing partnerships. We worked with seven rural counties in a Midwest state to conduct an environmental scan addressing HPV vaccine disparities between urban and rural adolescents. This presentation will focus on lessons learned from engaging rural stakeholders.

methods: Our first step was to convene advisory boards of state level actors and Midwestern rural health researchers. Initial conversations identified the importance of traveling to meet rural stakeholders in their own communities. We visited each county public health department (CPHD), meeting with people responsible for vaccinations. During these meetings we learned about local challenges related to HPV vaccine uptake and identified stakeholder groups for future data collection. We tailored data collection methods and recruitment to each group (school nurses, clinic managers, dentists, pharmacists, heath care providers, youth serving organizations, and faith-based organizations).

results: This process of tailoring data collection methods and recruitment was beneficial in gathering data from all stakeholders, except dentists, who reported that the HPV vaccine was not related to their work.

conclusions: We learned several lessons about working in rural communities. Meeting with stakeholders in-person proved to be successful to engage CPHDs who provided valuable contextual information. Secondly, tailoring data collection and recruitment helped us to effectively reach most of our participants and complete planned research activities for the scan.