HealthyPlaces.org > Intervention System | Community Setting
Level – Healthy Places Change Team
Intervention System
The Community Setting
Level – Healthy Places Change Team
Healthy Places Change Team –
The three people at the program site (Site Leaders) who participate
in the Community
Hub will implement the Change Team intervention. Each intervention
school is provided with a personnel and equipment budget for
enrichment activities at the after school site.
The enrichment activities consist of developing
policies and practices and delivering the evidence-based intervention.
The
desired outcome of the enrichment activities is to increase
students’ options for participating in physical activity
and for eating fruits and vegetables.
The Site Coordinator (one of the three Site
Leaders) leads a youth/adult Healthy Places Change Team to
function like
the Community Hub but operate only at the after school
site level.
So, the Community Hub is a model learning experience for
the Site Coordinator to lead the Change Team.
The Change
Team meets
at least monthly and involves student representatives
from each grade that has participants in the after-school program.
The Site Coordinator will help a Youth Leader conduct
the
meeting. Community/school adult leaders, parents and
staff will be
invited to the meeting when appropriate.
Worksheets to guide the Change Team process are
available in PDF format. Click on a title below to open the
file in a new window.
Evidence-Based Practices in Community
Places – A
menu of programs and strategies that evidence,
gathered through rigorous research, has shown to
promote healthy eating and physical activity. They can be implemented
and sustained in targeted places where children and youth live, learn,
and play, such as
out-of-school programs, home, early childhood education programs,
and faith communities.
For personnel who participate in the Community
Hub and in the Change Team, capacity to make informed decisions
is built over time. They will develop skills
in selecting and adapting evidence-based programs and strategies to meet
local needs and to move public health outcomes related
to eating, physical activity,
and obesity. Although control for decisions about what is best for children
and youth are made locally, to successfully implement quality programming,
these decisions should be informed by evidence-based programs and strategies.
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Healthy Place Change Team Strategies
Social persuasion and parental involvement. In general, Site
Leaders can use the Community Hub activities to facilitate
Healthy Place Change Teams. Each Site Coordinator has a goal
to create a local Change Team and have face-to-face meetings
where strategies are defined and logged using the Healthy
Youth Places Evaluation (H.Y.P.E.) system.
Media resources, such as fact sheets and newsletters,
provided by the intervention will encourage parents to participate
in changing behaviors related to increased physical activity
(PA)
and fruit and vegetable consumption (FJV). The parental component
is modeled after a successful parent-based intervention.
In the model intervention, parents who received the behaviorally-oriented
resource materials had higher expectations for the importance
of physical activity in children. This, in turn contributed
to increases in a child’s perception of parental support
for physical activity (Welk, 1999).
Vicarious modeling experiences. Each Healthy Place Change
Team will receive equipment and training that they will need
to
produce local documentary-style public service announcements
and environmental change model videos. Each Change Team (one
per site) will create a video and other media that accomplish
the following goals: 1) identify after school FJV and PA
goals and options, 2) identify barriers to these behaviors
in a variety
of settings, and 3) suggest ways to build new attractive,
accessible FJV and PA options in a variety of settings.
Easy-to-use digital video cameras and digital
video editing software make video production an inexpensive
way to share
information. The videos will be shown to community leaders
to assist with policy change and to students to recruit
them to the after school program. Mastery experiences. Healthy Place Change Teams
are encouraged to focus on developing the after school program.
Their
successes are documented through feedback by the Site Coordinators
using the H.Y.P.E. system. All students in the program
learn
Healthy
Place development skills, linking them to the Change Team,
when leaders present active learning lessons as they implement
the evidence-based intervention(s). We also supply a curriculum
that teaches environmental skills for this target audience
and
setting.
For individual members and for the Change Team
as a whole, these activities provide many opportunities. Members
develop and demonstrate new skills as individuals (personal
mastery
experiences) and as a team (group capacity). The activities
also demonstrate to members and to the Change Team itself
that they can make changes, i.e., the activities raise
individual and collective self-efficacy.
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