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Intervention System

The Project Level – Healthy Places Community Hub©

Healthy Places Community Hub© – A self-sustaining learning network and diffusion system that drives community planning, evaluation, and feedback around physical activity and nutrition opportunities, accessibility, and program quality improvement for children and youth.

What are the benefits of the Community Hub?
To successfully implement sustainable youth development programs, agencies must take into account the existing community delivery systems, resources, and barriers. The role of the Community Hub is to develop a local coordinating center that can cut across existing agencies and capitalize on opportunities.

The Community Hub can be primarily led by one organization, can be led by two or more collaborating agencies, or can be a truly equal partnership. Regardless of the structure, the Hub is a social network that can have an impact on public health by

• strengthening the collaborative capacity of local organizations and advocating for their interests
• working with local agencies to identify places for positive youth development and to build the capacity for financial and facility management of these places
• working with local organizations to identify, disseminate, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of programs and messages, using theory- and evidence-based approaches to improve healthy eating and physical activity in an ongoing quality improvement cycle.

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How does the Community Hub operate?
Consistent with our diffusion model, a Community Hub is developed. This collaborative group learns together, works together, and provides a way for people at a local, or community, level to develop skills needed to promote healthy eating and physical activity to youth.

Each site is represented in the Community Hub by the three Place Leaders who come into day-to-day contact with the youth. The Community Hub meets 4 times a year with intervention project staff, participates in a monthly conference call, and interacts continuously on the web, using this website’s “Community Network.”

In each face-to-face and phone session, the Community Hub is led by the intervention staff as it goes through a goal-setting and feedback process. The Community Hub members who work in the “Places” will learn to promote physical activity and healthy eating. The intervention staff will provide the Place Leaders with programs or strategies (evidence-based interventions) that have worked (brought about environmental changes) in similar situations. As part of the Community Hub, Place Leaders receive technical training on evidence-based interventions and connect with others in their region and state.

Because the resources and needs of each Place vary widely, the activities (evidence-based interventions) in the targeted Places at each site will also vary widely. Within the Community Hub, Place Leaders follow a place-based planning model. They will choose a number of strategic objectives, accounting for the fact that skills and self and collective efficacy for environmental change are developed through social persuasion, vicarious modeling experiences, and mastery experiences (Bandura, 1996; 1997).

Because Place Leaders and Healthy Places Change Teams need to build environmental change skills, the diffusion system (or Community Hub) makes it easier to develop and locate resources that they need. The Place Leaders and local communities leaders will use these resources during the planning and implementation process. The intention is that leaders at both the Community Setting and Place Levels are able to use the resources without continued dependence on experts.

As part of the Community Hub, leaders will receive technical training on the evidence-based interventions. After each training, participants will provide feedback about how the training met their needs. The project will be assessed on hypothesized mediators of community capacity, environmental change, and program implementation.

Click here to contact us to learn more about training opportunities or to schedule training sessions. (This will open in a new window.)

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Community Hub Strategies
Social persuasion. To motivate the group toward task goals, the community hub meets face-to-face quarterly. Combining these meetings with technical support and training is central to the intervention. Group goal setting and timely feedback on reaching goals will be used in all meetings so participants feel accountable, thereby heightening friendly social pressure to follow through on tasks.

These meetings also provide an opportunity for cross-site collaboration on objectives and allows place leaders to connect with one another. Monthly conference calls supplement the technical assistance, training, and group interaction. After a cross-site performance team is established at a face-to-face meeting, the Healthy Place Community Hub will provide a leader-to-leader web site. This web site allows leaders to connect with each other through a message board and other tools and to organize their efforts around the Healthy Youth Places intervention.

Vicarious modeling experiences. Site coordinators and Healthy Place Change Teams usually lack experience in successfully changing environments, which makes it a challenge to develop self-efficacy. Therefore, the intervention includes a series of video model documentaries that provides stories of successful group-based environmental change experiences. Site coordinators watch the videos at quarterly meetings and then give them to the site leaders for use with local change teams. The stories are hypothesized to raise self- and collective-efficacy for environmental change.

Mastery experiences. Site leaders are trained on the Healthy Places Change Team process and are provided with feedback documenting progress as they implement environmental changes at their after school site. Click here to see a diagram of the Healthy Place Change Team process in a new window.

The Healthy Youth Place Evaluation (H.Y.P.E.) is an extension of our earlier work (Fawcett, et al., 1995). H.Y.P.E. provides groups with mastery information (Dzewaltowski et al., 2002b) and with information for choosing where to invest their efforts. The complete H.Y.P.E. system provides feedback to help groups progress in implementing their place-based environmental changes. The feedback is organized around the key questions addressed in the planning and implementation model and documents students’ changes in self-efficacy and behavior.

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