Minigrants for Community Health

Porter, Christine; McCrackin, Peggy G.; Naschold, Felix

doi:10.1097/phh.0000000000000359

Cited by 8 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Extant literature highlights the wide range of public health initiatives supported by mini-grants, including physical activity [3–9], healthy eating [5, 7, 8, 10], childhood wellbeing [11], and other objectives outlined in Healthy People 2020 [1, 12]. For such public health initiatives, mini-grant funding varies substantially per funded project, from as low as $40 to as much as $50,000 [7]. Early evaluations of this approach focused, necessarily, on “process,” specifically the organizational administrative processes and partnerships needed to successfully administer the funding and implement the community-based activities [1, 3, 12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluability assessment of “growing healthy communities,” a mini-grant program to improve access to healthy foods and places for physical activity

et al. 2019

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Background Mini-grants have been used to stimulate multisector collaboration in support of public health initiatives by funding non-traditional partners, such as economic development organizations. Such mini-grants have the potential to increase access to healthy foods and places for physical activity through built environment change, especially in small and rural towns in the United States. Although a promising practice, few mini-grant evaluations have been done. Therefore, our purpose was to conduct an Evaluability Assessment (EA), which is a process that can help promising programs that lack evidence advance toward full-scale evaluation. Specifically, we conducted an Evaluability Assessment of a statewide mini-grant program, called “Growing Healthy Communities” (GHC), to determine if this program was ready for evaluation and identify any changes needed for future implementation and evaluation that could also inform similar programs. Methods Telephone interviews with directors of six past mini-grant recipient organizations were conducted to assess implementation and evaluability. The six interviews were split equally among agencies receiving funding for food-oriented projects and physical activity-oriented projects. Within- and cross-case thematic analyses of interview transcripts were conducted. Results Organizational capacity was a universal theme, reflecting other key themes (described in detail in the manuscript) that affected program implementation and evaluation, including collaboration , limited time and measurement integration . Conclusions . The EA process provided pilot data that suggest that other state, regional, and national funders should provide centralized assistance for data collection and evaluation from the outset of a mini-grant award program. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-019-7156-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluability assessment of “growing healthy communities,” a mini-grant program to improve access to healthy foods and places for physical activity

et al. 2019

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“…Also, the community gardening spaces that ENYF, WCP, and FLV have cultivated offer the space, soil and, especially with FLV in Laramie, affordable water, that are all necessary for gardening but not everyone has access to. Results from another study within the Food Dignity project, where US$40 gardening mini-grants were randomly provided to half the attendees at a gardening workshop, found that even small amounts of material support spurred interested people to start or expand food gardens (Porter, McCrackin, & Naschold, 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What Gardens Grow: Outcomes from Home and Community Gardens Supported by Community-based Food Justice Organizations

Porter

2018

J. Agric. Food Syst. Community Dev.

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Supporting home and community gardening is a core activity of many community-based organizations (CBOs) that are leading the food justice movement in the U.S. Using mixed methods across multiple action-research studies with five food justice CBOs, this paper documents myriad layers of benefits that gardening yields. Our participatory methods included conducting extensive case studies with five CBOs over five years; quantifying food harvests with 33 gardeners in Laramie, Wyoming, and surveying them about other gardening outcomes (20 responded); and conducting feasibility studies for assessing health impacts of gardening with two of the five CBOs, both in Wyoming. Analyses of these diverse data yielded four categories of gardening benefits: (1) improving health; (2) producing quality food in nutritionally meaningful quantities; (3) providing cultural services; and (4) fostering healing and transformation. Examining these results together illustrates a breadth of health, food, and cultural ecosystem services, and social change yields of home and community food gardening in these communities. It also points to the need to support CBOs in enabling household food production and to future research questions about what CBO strategies most enhance access to and benefits of gardening, especially in communities most hurt by racism and/or insufficient access to fresh food.

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“…The methods conventionally accepted as rigorous are beyond the scope of this paper and are detailed in our theses, dissertations, and other publications (Armstrong, 2015;Arthur, 2015;Bradley, 2011Bradley, , 2015Gregory, 2017;Gregory & Peters, this issue;Meek et al, 2017;Porter, 2010Porter, , 2013Porter, McCracken, & Naschold, 2016). However we also engaged in emotionally rigorous work, which we describe in the next section.…”

Section: Building Bridgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Graduate Students Bringing Emotional Rigor to the Heart of Community-University Relations in Food Dignity

Bradley

Gregory

Armstrong

et al. 2018

J. Agric. Food Syst. Community Dev.

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Minigrants for Community Health

Abstract: Even with very small amounts of money, minigrants show promise as an ethical, inexpensive, empowering, and effective health promotion strategy to enable families and communities to improve their health.

Cited by 8 publications

References 43 publications

Evaluability assessment of “growing healthy communities,” a mini-grant program to improve access to healthy foods and places for physical activity

Evaluability assessment of “growing healthy communities,” a mini-grant program to improve access to healthy foods and places for physical activity

What Gardens Grow: Outcomes from Home and Community Gardens Supported by Community-based Food Justice Organizations

Graduate Students Bringing Emotional Rigor to the Heart of Community-University Relations in Food Dignity

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