Community Engagement Proposal

INTRODUCTION

The prevalence of obesity continues to rise in children, adolescents, and adults. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that over a third of all United States (US) adults are currently obese, while almost one-fifth (nearly 12.5 million) of children and adolescents are obese (Flegal, Carroll, Kit, & Ogden, 2012; Ogden, Carroll, Kit, & Flegal, 2012). Overweight and obesity elevate the risk for chronic conditions including cardiovascular disease, hypertension, cancer, and non-insulin diabetes, which affect the quality of life and life expectancy (Field et al., 2001). Additionally, the devastating economic impact of the obesity epidemic can be characterized by uncontrollable healthcare expenditures (Wang, Beydoun,

The goal of community engaged research and initiatives is to promote social change by improving health outcomes and eliminating health disparities. Additionally community engagement is essential in sustaining the efforts because it involves organized groups, agencies, institutions and individuals as collaborators engaged in health promotion, research or policy making. In brief, this approach is initiated, facilitated, and maintained using various constructs/strategies including capacity building, community empowerment, and coalition building. An authentic community engagement approach is required to sustain and maximize community-programming efforts. Although the literature commonly cites the Social Ecological Model to frame the multifarious associations related to health outcomes and strategies to obesity prevention, authentic community engagement is driven by many models, many of which are still

Emergent phenomena result from patterns of collective behavior that form in the system; they cannot necessarily be foreseen from understanding the individual elements of a system (Hammond, 2009). In other words, the sum of a system may be greater than its parts in ways that are difficult to understand in traditional linear thinking.

Ultimately, most community interventions fail to perform appropriate programmatic evaluation. The potential benefits and impact are difficult to characterize if the goals, measures, and expectations are lacking, poorly designed and conducted or inappropriate for the type of programming conducted in the community. This is also reflected in behavior interventions in which it might be impossible to determine what the intended effects are.

While overwhelming in their entirety, the strength of models such as the Foresight obesity map lies in their presentation of complex issues in a grand scale, while still capturing their finer elements. Policymakers also believe that society may be at a tipping point in the obesity epidemic. Systems may finally be ready to change. This could be due, in part, to the estimated healthcare costs of the problem. While systems thinking may begin to help policymakers, the exploration of how to best go about this, and what are the best practices in doing so, is just