Implementation Actions for Communities

Community stakeholders and relevant partners should expand the capacity for local-level surveillance and applied research and should develop tools for community self-assessment to support childhood obesity prevention efforts.

To accomplish this,

Federal and state agencies, foundations, academic institutions, community-based nonprofit organizations, faith-based groups, youth-related organizations, local governments, and other relevant community stakeholders should

• Expand the surveillance of outcomes of community-level activities and changes to the built environment, as they relate to childhood obesity prevention;

• Facilitate the collection, analysis, and interpretation of relevant local data and information;

• Develop, refine, and disseminate community assessment tools, such as a community health index;

• Develop methods for the rapid evaluation of natural experiments;

• Explore the use of spatial mapping technologies to assist communities with their assessment needs and to help communities make changes that increase access to opportunities for healthy lifestyles; and

• Encourage the evaluation of interventions to examine both the risk and protective factors related to obesity.

Recommendation 4: Government, industry, communities, schools, and families should foster information-sharing activities and disseminate evaluation and research findings through diverse communication channels and media to actively promote the use and scaling up of effective childhood obesity prevention policies and interventions.

Implementation Actions for Communities

Community stakeholders should partner with foundations, government agencies, faith-based organizations, and youth-related organizations to publish and widely disseminate the evaluation results of community-based childhood obesity prevention efforts.

To accomplish this,