Healthier Douglas County Hosting Community Meeting, Coalition Building Event

Healthier Douglas County Coalition is hosting a community meeting and coalition building event tonight. The event is intended to engage community members and leaders in the coalition and obesity prevention efforts.

Coalition leaders Grace Gee, Mary Mahan and Lynne Bauer reached out to key community groups and leaders in a variety of ways, including:

• Letters to schools, businesses, elected officials and key community members
• One-on-one meetings
• Media

The event was featured in the Superior Telegram.

Gee said the fight against obesity must be fought on three levels — individual, community and corporate/government. It’s more complicated than telling people to change their behaviors, however. Coalition members hope to foster a climate that encourages good nutrition and physical exercise — easy access to trails, more gardening, use of fresh locally-grown foods, workers taking a walk during lunch breaks and more.

Read the full story here.

Unsolved Coalition Mysteries: Phone Banking

We spent Wednesday, Dec. 1 making training videos as part of the WI Clearinghouse for Prevention’s “Inspire Action Video Workshop” ... check out this one!

Unsolved Coalition Mysteries: Phone Banking from Tobwis on Vimeo.

Coalition Building Tip: What is your coalition's strength?

Throughout the course of the Active School Initiative, coalitions are expected to implement a least two strategies to build or strengthen the capacity of the coalition. Here are some tips to help your coalition accomplish the strategies suggested in the grant guidelines. Need to review the grant guidelines? You can find them on www.healthinpractice.org/project/Active-Schools.

Assessing the capacity of your coalition will help you identify strengths, weaknesses and gaps. One way to assess your capacity, is using the Nutrition, Physical Activity and Obesity Program's Coalition Self-Assessment Tool.

The survey will take about 30 minutes to complete. At the end of this assessment you can print a report with your coalition "score," which will indicate your relative level of resources.

A description of the categories and values for the Coalition Self-Assessment Tool and the resulting score is also available. A pdf version of the Coalition Self-Assessment Tool can also be downloaded to make it easier to fill in the tool as a group, before entering your answers online.