Illustrative Projects
Our center provides research and evaluation, teaching and training, and technical support and capacity building for a variety of initiatives.
Community and Public Health
Preventing Sexual Violence in Kansas Communities
With funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the KU Center for Community Health and Development supports the Kansas Department of Children and Environment’s efforts to address risk and protective factors for sexual violence prevention in Kansas communities (things like housing security, social connectedness, gender equity, poverty, environmental design, and alcohol outlet density). The KU CCHD supported community assessments in Douglas County, Finney County, Johnson County, and Wyandotte County, and provides ongoing strategic planning, technical assistance, and evaluation supports to these KDHE grantees working upstream to prevent sexual violence in Kansas communities.
Evaluating COVID-19 Response in Partnership with WHO Regional Office for Africa
The Center supported participatory monitoring and evaluation of the COVID-19 response with partners in Kenya, Senegal, and Gabon. The project used "sensemaking" protocols to guide partners’ systematic reflection in what they are seeing in the data (e.g., patterns in new cases over time) and what factors may have enabled or impeded the response. As part of our Center’s work as a designated WHO Collaborating Centre for Community Health and Development, we supported development of multiple case studies that reported on lessons learned in the COVID-19 response.
Child/Youth Health and Development
Supporting Maternal and Child Health
The KU Center for Community Health and Development provides evaluation and capacity-building training supports for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) maternal and child health leadership and staff. This includes implementation of a Maternal and Child Health Opportunity Project to provide funding to Kansas communities working to address health equity issues; training for family leaders through the KDHE Special Health Care Needs Family Advisory Council; and ongoing evaluation of implementation activities of the Title V Maternal and Child Health State Action Plan.
ThrYve
Our center received a grant from the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Minority Health, to improve youth outcomes by coordinating community efforts to address community risk and protective factors.
Community Prevention Documentation and Evaluation for Prevention in Kansas
The Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services (KDADS) has engaged our center in providing an infrastructure to support state and local efforts to prevent substance abuse in Kansas. We have provided statewide evaluation systems for data collection and analysis to support community capacity building and measurement of progress and community-level outcomes. Our center has provided participatory evaluation, documentation, and technical support for this ongoing effort since 1998.
Community Development and Capacity Building
Community Tool Box
The Community Tool Box empowers people with tools to change our world. With over 7,000 pages of information (and growing), and available in English, Spanish, Arabic, and Farsi, it includes training materials for key skill areas, real-life examples, and technical supports for problem solving. The Community Tool Box is the largest and most comprehensive resource of its kind in the world.
Project Aim4Peace
AIM4PEACE is a comprehensive public health strategy to reduce violence by supporting people active in their community and by connecting residents to basic services. The mission of Aim4Peace is to increase the community's capacity to handle its own disputes and empower citizens through community mobilization to peacefully resolve their conflicts. Our center provides training, technical support and participatory evaluation services for this initiative.
Developing and Implementing the African Health Action Toolkit
Our Center developed the African Health Action Toolkit at the request of the World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Africa. This Toolkit offers guidance for addressing health and development goals in local communities. It provides technical support for working together across sectors to change conditions to assure equal opportunities for health and development. The Toolkit provides questions to encourage dialogue, recommended actions, examples for different issues, and links to tools to support learning and action. As part of our Center’s work as a designated WHO Collaborating Centre for Community Health and Development, we support ongoing development and implementation of the Toolkit to help build capacity for intersectoral action.
Examples of Past Projects
Supporting the Douglas County COVID-19 Response and Recovery
The KU Center for Community Health and Development received support from the Kansas Health Foundation to partner with Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health and the Unified Command to document the local COVID-19 response and its associated contribution to flattening the curve. A local dashboard was created, featuring more than 700 accomplishments. This initiative helped generate understanding about what it takes to respond to the current pandemic as well as prepare for future outbreaks.
Growing Health Equity in Douglas County
With support from the Douglas County Community Foundation, staff at the KU Center for Community Health and Development partnered with Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health to create a Health Equity Report, released in 2021. The report featured data as well as stories from populations affected by health disparities in our Douglas County communities. This information will be used to guide future improvement efforts.
Latino Health for All
From 2009-2020, our KU Center was the lead partner for the Latino Health for All (LHFA) Coalition. LHFA was a collaborative partnership promoting healthy nutrition, physical activity, and access to health services among Latinos in Kansas City/Wyandotte County. Our KU Center led participatory evaluation and technical support for implementation.
The LHFA Coalition consisted of more than 40 active partners from different sectors and cultural backgrounds, reflecting a broad cross-section of the Latino and African American community. The LHFA began in early 2009 with support from a National Institutes of Health grant to our KU Center. It was sustained with grants from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, local foundations, and our Center.
During its decade-long active period, the LHFA Coalition and its partners implemented over 150 different community/system changes in Wyandotte County to promote healthy eating, active living, and access to culturally appropriate health care.
National Study of Community Efforts to Prevent Childhood Obesity
Our center was awarded a five-year grant as a scientific partner in the National Healthy Communities Study. Funded by NHLBI and several other NIH Institutes, CDC, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this national study examined what works in community-level efforts to prevent childhood obesity in nearly 200 U.S. communities.
Evaluation of the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation's Together on Diabetes Initiative
Our center served as the national evaluator for the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation's Together on Diabetes initiative, a $100 million, 5-year initiative which targeted adults in the United States disproportionately affected by type 2 diabetes. The aim of this participatory evaluation was to understand what was being accomplished by the initiative and to improve performance. The center customized a Community Check Box Evaluation System to provide the Foundation and grantees with real-time information about how projects were progressing toward their goals and objectives. Our center supported grantees and leaders of the initiative to reflect on progress being made, consider patterns in activities and outcomes, and determine what might be adjusted. Program evaluations, success stories, and lessons learned were communicated through grantee reports, case studies, presentations, and publications.
Evaluating the Impact of Coalition Training for Substance Use Prevention in Lima, Peru
Our center, in partnership with Michigan State University and the Universidad Peruano Cayetano Heredia (UPCH), received a two-year grant to evaluate the effects of coalition training on implementation of community processes and associated community changes (e.g., new or modified programs, policies, environmental changes, or other activities) implemented by substance use prevention coalitions in Lima, Peru. As part of this overall effort to combat the use and abuse of drugs and alcohol, this evaluation helped to determine the impact of the coalition training and efforts on rates of substance use in selected Lima municipalities. In a capacity building aspect of this project, training on participatory evaluation and documentation support was provided to the coalitions.
