Citation

Hussaini A, Pulido CL, Basu S, Ranjit N. Front. Public Health 2018; 6: e88.

Affiliation

University of Texas Health Science Center, Austin, TX, United States.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Frontiers Editorial Office)

DOI

10.3389/fpubh.2018.00088

PMID

29623272

PMCID

PMC5874305

Abstract

Place-based health efforts account for the role of the community environment in shaping decisions and circumstances that affect population well-being. Such efforts, rooted as they are in the theory that health is socially determined, mobilize resources for health promotion that are not typically used, and offer a more informed and robust way of promoting health outcomes within a community. Common criticisms of place-based work include the difficulty ofreplication, since engagement is so specific to a place, and limitedsustainabilityof the work, in the absence of continued institutional structures, both within the community and supporting structures outside the community, to keep these initiatives resilient. This paper describes a place-based initiative, GO! Austin/VAMOS! Austin (GAVA), which was designed to harness the strengths of place-based work-namely, its specificity to place and community. From the start, the project was designed to balance this specificity with a focus on developing and utilizing a standardized set of evidence-informed implementation and evaluation approaches and tools that were flexible enough to be modified for specific settings. This was accompanied by an emphasis on leadership and capacity building within resident leaders, which provided for informed intervention and demand building capacity, but also for longevity as partners, philanthropic, and otherwise, moved in and out of the work.

Language: en

Keywords

built environment; coalition-building; community change; obesity; place-based interventions; social-ecological model; sustainable interventions