AWARDS | Innovation Grant
Building a Healthy Food Environment: Sustaining a Community-based Environmental Intervention Program to Improve Diet and Health in American Indian Communities
Muge Qi, MHS, Doctoral Student, Department of International Health, JHSPH
Despite some success in nutrition intervention programs to improve diet and eating behaviors, a major limitation of most nutrition programs is lack of sustainability. It has been recommended that sustainability of public health programs must be actively planned, which includes developing goals and objectives specific to sustainability, transferring ownership of programs to communities, and developing strategies to foster sustainability. The proposed study is a sub-study of a larger effort to sustain and expand a successful food store-based environmental nutrition intervention program in American Indian communities, the Apache Healthy Stores (AHS) study, to improve diet and reduce risk for obesity and other chronic disease. The overall goal of the proposed study is to examine if a community-run AHS program would establish readiness for long-term sustainability of the program on the two American Indian reservations. Specifically we will (1) evaluate effect of the community-run AHS program on community capacity; (2) evaluate level of institutionalization of the AHS program in local organizations; and (3) evaluate impact of the community-run AHS program on patterns of food purchase, food preparation and dietary quality in the target population. As a secondary aim we also will examine relationship among the three components of sustainability (capacity-building, institutionalization, and program effectiveness) and factors that influence institutionalization of the program. The proposed study is based on an ecological model for health promotion and community-based participatory research principles. It uses innovative approaches to understand the process of sustainability, particularly to what extent a transfer of a research-based nutrition intervention program to a community-owned program would establish readiness for long-term sustainability of the program, and factors that influence it. This study will facilitate the larger efforts to build a long-term sustainable healthy food environment and improve health of disadvantaged minority population. This is directly in line with the CLF objective to promote innovative, interdisciplinary research on the challenges of creating sustainable food systems and the complex interactions among environment, food, diet, health, population and equity represented in the CLF conceptual model.
Results Research in progress
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