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| The California Wellness Foundation's
Children and Youth Community Health Initiative |
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The
Children and Youth Community Health Initiative (CYCHI), funded
by The California Wellness Foundation (TCWF) was designed to
create opportunities to build healthy communities through the
transformation of social, physical and chemical environments.
Selecting from responses to a statewide call for proposals,
TCWF chose sixteen community-based organizations (CBOs) to
lead an eighteen-month community-wide planning process between
October 1997 and March 1999. The Imoyase Group, Inc. was
selected as the Evaluation/Dissemination (E/D) grantee in July
1997 and re-confirmed as the E/D grantee in June
1999.
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CYCHI has taken the approach of building on a
problems and assets analysis. This Initiative asks community
members to define and prioritize factors related to health,
issues posing threats to their community’s health and
wellness, and best strategies, given their unique context. The
Initiative believes that changes in health and wellness among
diverse California communities may be effected through adults
and youth working together to transform their local
environments
During this planning stage, the selected
CBOs identified key health issues and developed strategies for
empowering young people to play key roles in community-based
environmental transformation activities. This was a critical
time for each community to mobilize youth and adults and
actively involve them in the development of the community’s
health and wellness agenda. The lead agencies served as
facilitators in this community development
process.
Following the planning period, ten of the sixteen sites
received 3½ additional years of funding for program implementation.
Each site was to build a "wellness village"
that produced transformations in targeted environments
selected by its adult and youth constituents. Each wellness
village embraced a vision of wellness in its definition
of health, and anchored this vision in a belief in the
salience of community and neighborhood as the setting
for health promotion. This was guided by TCWF’s definition
of health disseminated to grantees via the RFP process.
This definition was based on the concept of health put
forth by the World Health Organization.
Wellness is a measure of an individual’s
physical, mental and social health…[it] is more than the
absence of disease; it is the ability of people and
communities to reach their best potential in the broadest
sense. The village is a setting for health, the place where
people engage in daily activities in which environmental,
organizational, and personal factors interact to affect
health and well-being. CYCHI E/D RFP,
3/99.
Imoyase's primary task was to serve as the Initiative-wide
evaluator for CYCHI. Our role was to assist wellness villages
in the following areas:
- Provide a comprehensive evaluation of processes,
outcomes, and impacts of the Initiative;
- Design and implement a dissemination plan;
- Assist TCWF with establishing objectives and baseline
indicators;
- Provide community collaboratives with timely feedback to
increase effectiveness;
- Engage Initiative participants in the process of
evaluation/dissemination;
developing a participatory
design that actively involves program participants at all
levels.
In the planning phase, Imoyase designed an
evaluation strategy that emphasized the formation of
site-specific evaluation teams and the collection of process
data, community assets, and immediate activity outcomes to
assess the overall planning process. In the participatory
model, each planning site collaborated in the design and
implementation of evaluation activities via site evaluation
teams, staff and community input.
In
contrast to planning, the implementation phase marked the
full-scale execution of a multi-component wellness village
plan that integrated academic support, mentoring and community
health projects. These plans were intended to result in
environmental transformation and improved community health.
For the implementation phase, with the participatory model
intact, Imoyase constructed a new evaluation strategy that
emphasized the (1) assessment of outcomes within and across
wellness villages, (2) an evaluation of the Initiative Support
Process, and (3) an evaluation of the overall Initiative's
theory of change. Points two and three led to a widening of
the evaluation lens during the implementation phase to include
not only the activities of the wellness villages but also the
technical support activities of the Initiative Support
Grantees and the Intititave’s own structure and logic
model.
Each of the villages operated within a
three-component structure to organize efforts to improve
community health.
 Community
Health Projects: Community designed health promotion
activities and programs intended to transform community
environments and thereby positively affect community
health.
Community
Mentors Program: Programs designed to provide children
and youth with mentoring experiences and the chance to work
with adults on community service projects that promote
health and enhance the environment.
Academic
Support Program: Partnerships between wellness villages
and local institutions of higher education designed to
increase understanding, capacity and social capital1 around
health issues in the community.
CYCHI is
grounded in the community-based health promotion paradigm.
Community- based health promotion strategies, diverse as they
are, usually fall into one of two categories: (1) programs
that have as their main objective(s) the prevention of
specific diseases, illnesses, and symptoms and (2) community
development projects with an objective to promote specific
health outcomes (Mittelmark, 1999). CYCHI falls under the
latter approach. Programs of this nature focus on building
community capacities to mount and manage different kinds of
health promotion programs or to improve the basic foundations
for a thriving community.
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