Designing Place-Based Interventions for Sustainability and Replicability: The Case of GO! Austin/VAMOS! Austin

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 of replication, since engagement is so specific to a place, and limited sustainability of 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.

Commentary: Collaborative Action on Child Equity: Lessons from the Field

“…In reflecting on SSC's objectives and our experience in pursuing them, we have come to understand our efforts as reflecting an emerging paradigm in public health that focuses on person-and place-based investments. 8 As such, what the lessons described herein broadly reflect is the need and role of programmatic tailoring in order to maximize program effectiveness for community-based participatory research programs to take such considerations into account. Unlike the methodological controls afforded in randomly controlled trials/interven-tion programs, community-engaged programming and research often requires some degree of latitude in the implementation strategies employed.…”

“…The purpose of this commentary is to highlight several of the lessons learned relative to effective community engagement and place-based investments. 7,8 We provide preliminary descriptive information regarding program impacts to illustrate how the lessons learned can inform future academic-community collaborative engagements; we also offer a case example highlighting program impact.…”

Characterizing Micro-scale Disparities in Childhood Obesity: Examining the Influence of Multilevel Factors on 4-Year Changes in BMI, Healthy Eating, and Physical Activity, Among a Cohort of Children Residing in Disadvantaged Urban Enclaves

“…The Eastern Crescent of Austin is predominantly Hispanic (and mostly populated by people of Mexican origin or descent), with several of the zip codes in the bottom 10 percent of all zip codes in Texas when classified by income. This area has a notably deficient built environment and infrastructure for PA and healthy eating, limited transportation mobility, and high concentrations of child obesity (24, 25). It has been identified as a priority area for developing, testing and implementing community-driven strategies for healthy eating and physical activity.…”

“…It has been identified as a priority area for developing, testing and implementing community-driven strategies for healthy eating and physical activity. The parent evaluation study was conducted within the context of a natural experiment to assess the GAVA intervention, a community-based led coalition that has promoted several community-wide strategies to improve healthy living in the Dove Springs area of the Eastern Crescent since 2013 (24). Preliminary data suggest some favorable changes in adult obesity and health behaviors in the first 5 years, but there is little evidence of positive overall change in child-level outcomes (unpublished data).…”

Developmental science aimed at reducing inequality: Maximizing the social impact of research on executive function in context

“…Targeted place‐based approaches include greening vacant lots to reduce crime and crime‐related trauma (Branas et al, ) or increasing “built environment assets” such as parks and play spaces to reduce obesity (Hussaini et al, ). More universal approaches include the organization and integration of social and health services within specific neighbourhoods to reduce health disparities broadly and promote healthy child development, including exposure to acute stressors, strategies to promote adult and child mental health, as well as supports for students' social–emotional development and academic achievement.…”