A Grant to Reduce Childhood Obesity in Your Community
Building Healthy Families (BHF):
BHF has three research-tested program components:
- Simple nutrition education sessions to help families eat more healthfully.
- Fun physical activity promotion for the whole family.
- Support to help families set goals to follow-through on eating and activity plans.
Education Sessions:
- 12 weekly face to face family education sessions.
- 4 education sessions to keep families from falling back into old habits after the 12-week program.
- A final refresher session between 6 months and 1 year followed by a final follow-up check-in session a year after the families begin the program.
What is special about BHF?
- Designed in Nebraska for small towns and rural communities where services for families are spread across a number of community organizations.
- It works! BHF reduced childhood obesity in participating families in rural Nebraska, as well, or better than programs tested in research studies.
- Packaged as a ’turn-key, electronic box’ with everything a community needs to be trained on the program, work with community partners to engage families, and deliver the program (including program materials).
- Includes a secure evaluation portal for program outcomes that meets clinical privacy standards.
- Designed to be easy to try out and determine the best way to deliver the program in your community.
Our Goal: Our goal is to identify communities that are interested in delivering BHF and provide those communities with the resources necessary for program implementation.
Community Partners
To deliver the program communities will identify an organization that can lead the efforts to recruit families to the program and an organization that will deliver BHF. Communities can identify one organization who can fill both roles or have multiple organizational partners. If there are more than two community organizations, please add to the template below to include those additional organizations.
Eligibility Requirements and Community Selection
- Any community in Nebraska outside of Omaha and Lincoln.
- Completion of Letter of Intent (LOI) Template (see below).
- Submission of the LOI Template by November 1, 2019 to Project Coordinator, Ali Malmkar malmkaram@unk.edu
- The project lead and at least 2 members from each organization listed on the LOI Template must complete a pre-application survey 7 days after submitting the LOI Template. Our team will send a link to this survey once we receive your completed LOI Template.
- Communities that complete the LOI Template and all necessary pre-application surveys will be asked to complete a 1000-word narrative (approximately 2 pages) on community priorities and plans to implement BHF.
REQUEST FOR COMMUNITY NARRATIVES: A Grant to Reduce Childhood Obesity in Your Community
The request of Community Narratives is only for communities that have completed the letter of intent process described above and received an invitation to submit.
Community Narrative: A 1000 word narrative that will be used to select communities to implement BHF. The narrative must address each of the following points.
- Describe how childhood obesity fits within your community’s current identified needs.
- Briefly describe how you would plan to recruit families to participate in BHF, including low-income families.
- Briefly describe who would deliver BHF and the expertise of that person (people) to deliver this type of program (be sure to consider the nutrition, physical activity, and behavior change components of the program).
- Describe where would you be able to host the program in your community? Identify a potential facility for implementation that has room for physical activities (gym, multi-purpose room, etc).
- Briefly describe how you could see your community sustaining BHF beyond the life of the demonstration project.
- Describe your interest in, and willingness to, participating in a collaborative group with other communities trying to figure out how best to deliver BHF in their communities.
Evaluation Criteria
- Demonstrated local priority or need.
- Ability of community to develop recruitment methods.
- Ability of community to deliver BHF.
- Plan for sustainability.
- Willingness to participate in the learning collaborative.
- Likelihood of success in recruiting families and implementing BHF with high quality.
Informational Webinar: We will offer an informational webinar on November 22, 2019 at 1:30pm. We encourage the lead organization and other partners to attend this information session. Additional details on this will be shared at a later time.
Deadline
- All Community Narratives are due by midnight December 15, 2019, local time. Please submit to Project Coordinator, Ali Malmkar malmkaram@unk.edu
- Selected communities will be notified by January 15th, 2020.
Printable RFA Instructions