External Resources Directory

Guide and coalition development tools

Each year the National Complete Streets Coalition ranks new Complete Streets policies to celebratethe people who developed exceptional policy language and to provide leaders at all levels ofgovernment with examples of strong Complete Streets policies. This year the Coalition is proud toaward the City of Reading, PA’s 2015 policy the first-ever score of 100 points. We want tocongratulate Reading in particular for their outstanding work. Notably, and key for a perfect score likethis, the policy goes beyond a vision for Complete Streets to clearly commit to building an integrated,context-sensitive transportation network.

A wide array of tools exists for measuring different features of the built environment, many of them well validated. However, it is often difficult for state and local program staff and evaluators to know which features of the built environment are most important to measure and which tool(s) to use to assess those features. The recently released CDC Built Environment Assessment Tool was designed to alleviate some of these challenges. The built environment includes the physical makeup of where we live, learn, work, and play—our homes, schools, businesses, streets and sidewalks, open spaces, and transportation options. The built environment can influence overall community health and individual behaviors such as physical activity and healthy eating.

The Child Nutrition Forum – a diverse group of hundreds of national organizations – urges Congress to make critical investments and improvements in the upcoming Child Nutrition Reauthorization that would increase and protect access to quality, nutritious foods in programs that serve children in child care, at home, during school and out of school. Such an investment is critical to improving the overall well-being of millions of children in America. Here is the link to the website where you can find more information about the forum and resources from all the partner organizations.

Health Education & Behavior, October 2015.Abstract As resources for health promotion become more constricted, it is increasingly important to collaborate across sectors, including the private sector. Although many excellent models for cross-sector collaboration have shown promise in the health field, collective impact (CI), an emerging model for creating larger scale change, has yet to receive much study. Complementing earlier collaboration approaches, CI has five core tenets a shared agenda, shared measurement systems, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a central infrastructure. In this article, we describe the CI model and its key dimensions and constructs. We briefly compare CI to community coalition action theory and discuss our use of the latter to provide needed detail as we apply CI in a critical case study analysis of the Tenderloin Healthy Corner Store Coalition in San Francisco, California. Using Yin’s multimethod approach, we illustrate how CI strategies, augmented by the community coalition action theory, are being used, and with what successes or challenges, to help affect community- and policy-level change to reduce tobacco and alcohol advertising and sales, while improving healthy, affordable, and sustainable food access. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of CI as a framework for health promotion, as well as the benefits, challenges, and initial outcomes of the healthy retail project and its opportunities for scale-up. Implications for health promotion practice and research also are discussed.