News & Views of Phillips Since 1976
Tuesday December 23rd 2025
A-Pod CHAT: Advancing Opportunities through a Partnership of Diabetics
When A Partnership Of Diabetics (A-POD) was first designed and implemented, our goal was simply to create a community-based program for advancing the skills of persons with diabetes to become better self-managers of their condition. We started with POD-Tensives, a daylong workshop to introduce our strategies to participants and then sponsored weekly Meet-ups where participants could share the “mile-markers” on their journey toward better health and wellness. Meet-ups became and still are the key ingredient in A-POD”'s program because it”'s the time that participants can actually share their progress or problems with others with similar challenges.
Meet-ups are more than a “support group” because we also track participant”'s numbers to demonstrate that with the additional focus on diabetes and learning new and better tools to manage our conditions, we improve! In a third party evaluation conducted by a graduate student from the University of Minnesota”'s School of Public Health we found that more than 90% of our participants have improved, using the same statewide criteria used by all Minnesota clinics and hospitals.… Read the rest “A-Pod CHAT: Advancing Opportunities through a Partnership of Diabetics”
Evaluation & Learning
Understanding and sharing our results is a critical component of the BYI. The BYI created an evaluation team that consists of contracted evaluators, the CWC and an evaluation community fellow team to provide objective evaluation for the Backyard”'s resident engagement activities. The Evaluation team worked with the Community”'s Commission to develop a strength-based approach to monitoring and evaluating CHAT health promotion projects. The majority of the work has focused on helping residents develop their own tools for collecting information and understanding their work. A year-end template was developed in conjunction with the Assessment Team and Commission to allow CHATs to report their progress and challenges.
The evaluation team also completed a review of several hundred articles in the fields of community building and mobilization for health promotion. The review demonstrated that the BYI is unique among national health improvement projects because in the BYI, the needs assessment, planning and action are generated by the community so that the community is the agent, rather than the target of change. The findings of the review and the foundation year activities have led to the development of a very comprehensive and ambitious evaluation plan for 2012 that will assess how well the partnership idea between Allina and the community is working, the progress of empowering residents to build capacity for health promotion, and the impact of this capacity for actually creating positive health benefits for residents.… Read the rest “Evaluation & Learning”
You Matter
Stone columns being built in 1928
By Sue Hunter Weir
A cemetery seems like an odd place to be talking about building a healthy community since it”'s where most of us will wind up when our health ultimately and inevitably fails. But cemeteries are about more than our physical selves, they are about the legacy that we leave to others and that others have given to us. They are about stories; they are about community.
Nation Builders.
Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It is a place of national, not just local, significance. Part of the designation recognizes the cemetery”'s architectural features, but another part, perhaps the most important part, recognizes the role that the people who are buried here in the Phillips community played in both our local and national history. They are not people whose names are household words, yet they are recognized as nation builders.
“”¦who is worth remembering and who is not”¦?”
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