Posts Tagged ‘Allina Health Systems’
Partners in the Backyard Initiative
Allina Health: The Center for Health Care Research & Innovation researches new care models to transform health and health care and seeks collaborative partnerships as it fosters innovative approaches to providing care. Cultural Wellness Center: is a non-profit community-based organization dedicated to developing cultural approaches for positively impacting health and health care, economic development, and community building. Hope Community: A Phillips community development organization committed to deep community engagement. Hope Community led the process of engaging non-profit organizations in the Backyard. Portico Healthnet: A nonprofit health and human services organization that helps uninsured Minnesotans access affordable health coverage and care.
Highlights of 2011: Strategies & Activities
Community Engagement & Leadership Community Engagement in the BYI is lead and facilitated by the Cultural Wellness Center. The community infrastructure for the initiative consists of three “pillars”: Citizen Health Action Teams (CHATs) Community Com-mission on Health Community Resource Body. CHATs are formed by residents to design, implement and evaluate prevention and wellness projects. Each project targeted barriers to health, weaknesses in achieving health, and followed the recommendations outlined in the 2009 community health needs Assessment. In 2011, the CHATs held 173 activities in which 1285 residents participated. The following key themes were identified and implemented across the CHATs: Strategies to increase social support within their identified communities; Strategies to increase social cohesion within the Backyard community; Strategies based on their knowledge of problems and solutions and based on their skill set; Inventory [...]
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 [...]
