Community‐Based System Dynamics for Mobilizing Communities to Advance School Health

Abstract

BACKGROUND:Frameworks such as the WSCC model provide evidence-based guidance for addressing school health at the school, district, and regional level. However, frameworks do not implement themselves; they require the mobilization and collaboration of stakeholders within communities and an understanding of the unique resources and barriers within each context. Furthermore, addressing school health presents a complex systems problem. METHODS: Community-based system dynamics (CBSD) is a participatory approach for engaging communities in understanding and changing complex systems. We used a descriptive multiple case study design to evaluate how and why CBSD was used as a tool for stakeholders to engage with the complexity of school health. RESULTS:We analyzed 3 cases to understand how these methods were used to enhance collaboration, analysis, and community action at multiple levels, including in 2 school districts, with a city-wide stakeholder committee, and with a group of high school students. CONCLUSIONS: Community-based system dynamics presents a promising approach for building shared language and ownership among stakeholders, tailoring to local community contexts, and mobilizing stakeholders for action based on new system insights. We close with a discussion of unique opportunities and challenges of expanding the use of CBSD in the field of school health.

Planning, implementing, and evaluating an online group‐model‐building workshop during the COVID‐19 pandemic: celebrating successes and learning from shortcomings

“…Public health researchers have increasingly turned to system dynamics (SD) modeling to explicate the latent dynamically complex causal mechanisms that shape and perpetuate health disparities (Apostolopoulos et al ., 2020 ; Diez‐Roux, 2011 ; Hammond et al ., 2017 ). As a participatory approach to the development of SD models, system dynamics group model building (SD GMB) has the potential to increase stakeholders’ understanding of the systems nature of public health problems and can maximize stakeholder buy‐in (Ballard et al ., 2020 ; Mui et al ., 2019 ). SD GMB workshops are commonly facilitated in a face‐to‐face format, where facilitators may advantageously engage stakeholders in opening icebreakers or culturally specific activities which often help to build rapport among facilitators and participants (Gerritsen et al ., 2020 ) and can employ tools such as flipcharts, whiteboards, and printed materials to engage stakeholders in convergent and divergent tasks (Hovmand et al ., 2015 ).…”

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“…It is important for researchers to avoid repeating the extractive and exploitative history between white institutions and Indigenous and Black people. See examples of how to avoid extractive relationships between researchers and communities from anthropology (Asase, Mzumara-Gawa, Owino, Peterson, & Saupe, 2021), public health (Ballard, Farrell, & Long, 2020), engineering (Leydens & Lucena, 2018), and design (Costanza-Chock, 2020).…”

Towards Eco-Friendly Responsibilities

“…By enlarging the ecological expertise where all farmers can go further in accessing such crop diversification for instance, the way of understanding and applying in the real field together with passing on to their peer group (Ballard et al, 2020). In this regard, the continued attempts amongst skills, teamwork commitment among their peer of the realm, and also communication approach could contribute in facilitating their experience basis to help their partnership group in an effective way (Barnes et al, 2019;Huda et al, 2021c).…”