The proposed project, Iowa Obesity Program Leveraging Activities and Partnerships to Address Obesity (Iowa LEAP) will address two key obesity-associated risk factors--poor diet and physical inactivity, in six of the high obesity Iowa counties by: ) building and strengthening partnerships and coalitions across sectors, 2) assessing communities’ health and equity needs, 3) identifying key priorities, 4) developing capacity to implement interventions, and 5) providing programmatic assistance to leverage resource development necessary to increase healthy food and physical activity access.¿The purpose of Iowa LEAP is to build on state, county, and community resources to implement evidence-based strategies for improving food and nutrition security and safe and accessible physical activity.
The Iowa LEAP state team will support the county extension offices to engage with community members to identify community needs and implement strategies that will 1) increase access to healthier foods, 2) improve policies, plans, or community design to increase physical activity access. This will be accomplished by working with transdisciplinary partners to create collaborations that improve the food system and built environment. By supporting healthy nutrition standards and environments through partnerships with community coalitions, health care systems, food banks/pantries, older adult focused agencies, and more; coordinating the uptake and expansion of nutrition incentives and vouchers leveraging existing programs; and collaborating with partners to implement local level policies and activities to connect pedestrian, bicycle, or transit transportation networks to everyday destinations.¿¿
Process and evaluation outcomes will be assessed for each activities’ overall effectiveness, impact and reach to understand how the community policies, systems, and environments changes since the implementation of Iowa LEAP strategies and how health equity activities were prioritized in Iowa LEAP counties. The Iowa LEAP evaluation plan will be informed by the Practical Implementation Sustainability Model and Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, Maintenance (PRISM RE-AIM) integrated framework. RE-AIM provides a way to clearly operationalize reach and efficacy of programs, policies and practices implemented through the project; however, the advantage of PRISM is that it focuses on strategies to guide partners to use the information to guide and refine their local programming. All proposed strategies and key activities use policy, system, and environmental (PSE) approaches with multidimensional strategies, designed to improve reach and sustainability of changes made beyond the 5-year period of performance.
