|
The KU Work Group's Community Tool Box is the world's largest resource
(over 7,000 pages of content) for building capacity for community health and development.
Since 1975, the KU Work Group has worked with partners to address two key research questions:
How do people work together to bring about change in communities? And, under what conditions
are these changes associated with improvement in community health and development?
The University of Kansas’ Work Group for Community Health and Development has been redesignated as an official World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Community Health and Development for another four years.
Stephen Fawcett, Kansas Health Foundation Distinguished Professor, and Jerry Schultz, co-director of the KU Work Group on Community Health and Development, will continue to direct the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Community Health and Development at KU.
“We are honored to continue in this extraordinary network of centers working to assure conditions for health and human development,” said Fawcett. “As a WHO Collaborating Centre, we have opportunities to learn and contribute with those who are working for health equity around the world.” More...
The University of Kansas Work Group on Community Health and Development and the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department have launched a new kind of partnership, called the Academic Health Department, the first in Kansas and one of only a few in the country.
The KU Work Group is a longstanding partner with the Health Department, most recently in facilitating the recent Comprehensive Community Health Assessment, but the Academic Health Department takes the collaboration a step further.
“We hope to ultimately create a shared research agenda with the Health Department,” said Vicki Collie-Akers, assistant research professor, who leads the KU effort, “to merge our goals with theirs.” More…
The KU Work Group was recently selected to serve as the national evaluators for the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation's Together on Diabetes initiative, a $100 million initiative which targets adults in the United States that are disproportionately affected by type 2 diabetes. Together on Diabetes is a five-year initiative that was launched in November 2010.
The Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation and Together on Diabetes grantees evaluate their efforts to understand what is being accomplished by the initiative and improve performance at the individual project and overall initiative levels. The KU Work Group will develop and implement an Online Documentation and Support System to provide the Foundation and its Together on Diabetes grantees with real-time information about how projects are progressing toward their goals and objectives. The Work Group supports grantees and leaders of the Together on Diabetes initiative to reflect on the progress being made, identify and consider changes occurring in the community, and determine what impact the changes may have and what can be adjusted and improved. Program evaluations, success stories, and lessons learned will be communicated through grantee reports, case study books, presentations and publications.
More...
The KU Work Group was recently selected for one of ten Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health (REACH) for Communities Organized to Respond and Evaluate (CORE) programs across the nation. Our project, “Mobilizing to Reduce Health Disparities among Latinos in Wyandotte County Kansas,” will take a health equity approach to working to prevent diabetes and cardiovascular disease among the Latino community.
The REACH CORE is a new program of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to implement policy, systems, and environmental changes aimed at achieving positive outcomes in eliminating racial and ethnic health disparities in health priority areas.
More information on this project, as well a list of the other grantees, can be found on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.
The KU Work Group is a scientific partner in the National Study of Childhood Obesity Prevention Programs. Funded by several NIH Institutes, CDC, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation , this five-year study will examine what works in community-level efforts to prevent childhood obesity.
Full Story
In August of 2008, the KU Work Group received a five-year grant to test a model to reduce health disparities in the Latino Community of Kansas City. To learn more about the Latino Health for All Partnership, click here. This grant was funded by the NIH/National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities. |
