Our NLAPH Journey: The Healthy Communities Wyandotte Education Action Team
2015 Cohort
Impact of NLAPH on Our Team
Our Progress
Leadership Goals
Our team learning experience:
Our team leadership goals:
Project Outcomes
Our project focused on engaging a variety of partners across sectors to promote a coordinated health education message and support organizations across sectors in implementing policy and environmental change to support families to have the opportunity to engage in those behaviors.
The Framing the Message Tool assisted us in planning how to communicate our "ask" to multiple sectors, including those we weren't currently working with.
We hosted a breakfast for 110 community leaders and used the concept of Collective Impact to pitch why they should use the initiative to work towards community health improvement in the county.
We were able to engage about 30 organizations from education, faith-based, non-profit, and government sectors to participate in the initiative. We continue to conduct outreach to support their participation in the initiative.
-Engages community and stakeholders
-Ability to work effectively across sectors
-Communicates effectively
-Values collective impact
- 20 Community Partners committed to sharing the 12345 Fit-Tastic! and implementing policy and environmental change
- Billboards garnering 3.5 million impressions over 12 weeks
- 11,900 people reached with the 12345 Fit-tastic! message at community events throughout the county
- Pilots successfully completed- MAPPS for Change (work plans) completed, sites implementing policy change and activities to support healthy lifestyles
What's Next?
- Continue to evaluate the initiative's implementation in 2015.
- Meet with partners to assess progress, learn from them what worked and what didn't.
- Conduct a formal survey early 2015 to measure impact.
Lessons Learned from Bumps Along the Road
- Continue outreach to current partners, providing technical assistance and support.
- Work with community partners to ensure that the message remains present in the community (flags and banners used at community events.
- Continue our social media presence.
- We have an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer dedicated to the implementation of this initiative in Wyandotte County.
Worked with the funder to extend the timeline
Attended a social media training, began to "tag" partner organizations
Moved at "the Speed of Trust," adjusted so that organizations had time to plan for truly feasible changes they wanted to make.
- Apply lessons learned from evaluation activities to improve our implementation
- Increase community partners
- Work within the business community to engage business partners
- Continue to expand resources available for supporting community partners
Increased outreach, this is still a work in progress, especially with an extended timeline.
- Delayed implementation due to the IRB process
- Our social media campaign- linking in all of the different organizations involved
- MAPPS taking much longer than we thought to develop
- Getting organizations to report back what they are doing
- The Spanish video took much longer for the marketing company to produce because they didn't have staff capacity.
- Our videos were a big investment but we didn't have the level of reach that we'd like.
Requesting the marketing company to include a strategy for reaching viewers and a timeline for completion, both in English and Spanish.
A HUGE thank you to the NLAPH team and the Center for Health Leadership and Practice as well as our coach, Dr. Horton. We have appreciated the opportunity to take this journey!
improved team dynamics, renewed dedication to work, inspiration, increased skills, focus on health equity, great discussions, considering all perspectives, supportive coach
"I was inspired by the speakers at the retreat and the Learning Curve concept to embrace the challenging moments of my work as what helps me learn the most. At the same time I was involved in NLAPH, I was launching a Fetal Infant Mortality Review community action team for our county. I used many of the team-building and healthy team dynamic learning in that process, and also leaned into those challenging moments when I felt like giving up- I could savor them as moments of true learning. I'm moving into a new role at my health department and will be working on facilitating change towards accreditation-readiness in the organization. I will use everything I learned in NLAPH, from a focus on data , to the modeling we experienced from NLAPH staff in continuous quality improvement, to being more effective engaging community members in health improvement and dealing with the "tension of turf." Thank you so much to NLAPH and our leadership coach, Dr. Mark Horton, for investing in our community and investing in us!"
The individual leadership gleaned from this program spans wide and deep. The skills I ascertained from the work have significantly impacted my professional and civic roles. The boundary spanning and collective responsibility impacts the planning process. The forethought for leaders to consider being on the balcony has forced me to pause and continually reflect on engagement and collaboration. The dancing analogy was powerful and I consistently approach my professional role and community work with this in mind. Does the work happen to or for the groups or programs? Or are we intentional with inclusion and the social determinants that impact the community? The consistent language and clear purpose is critical to the work of the community. HCW is embedded in our community, stakeholders and organizations, and it is my hope that HCW continues to apply the learning moving forward by meeting short and long term goals.
Growth in Our NLAPH Journey
As the lead for a local nonprofit, my growth through NLAPH has allowed me to focus on collective rather than individual leadership. NLAPH has been a personal journey, during which I have reflected on my current leadership style and have committed to creating a plan for developing new skills. Being part of the 2015 cohort has taught me to understand how the bigger agenda or objectives can work together, and has led me to adopt a balanced, open-minded approach to the concerns of others.
The NLAPH experience reminded me how important it is to take the time to reflect, not only as an individual, but also as a team. The monthly calls with our coach provided a natural and helpful opportunity to “get on the balcony” and look down on what we were doing, how we were leading and what we could learn and observe. I was inspired by the challenge to continually keep health equity and social determinants of health at the center of our work and to focus not only on hard outcomes, but also on those processes and activities that lead to true collaboration and collective impact. Outside of this project, I am working with other community partners to develop a “community-engaged governance structure” for our work, and it has been a difficult and slow journey at times. I continually go back to the notion that we must “move at the speed of trust” when engaging diverse partners and community members. I work in a large hospital system which is very progressive, but sometimes defaults to a medical model of health care provider as expert. This experience has inspired me to continue to challenge myself, my own colleagues and my institution to engage community as the experts and to make health equity a central focus in everything that we do.
The Applied Health Leadership Project
Goals of Our Team Moving Forward
Our intended impact is
healthier Wyandotte
County families!
We created a video in English to showcase the project...
Our Big Picture remained similar from start to finish...
... y un video en español también.
Our team will continue to implement the Healthy Lifestyles Initiative in Wyandotte County. Our team has an AmeriCorps VISTA staff member that will continue working across sectors with organizations in the county to implement policy and environmental change, promote the unified health message of 12345 Fit-tastic! and develop resources to support community partners.
We broadened the scope of our project impact statement...
We realized
we should make minor adjustments to our outcomes...
We clarified our Pathway to Change to be more specific.
The EAT will be promoting the Raising of America documentary and hosting a screening in our community.
We also have a continued interest in addressing health equity. We are part of the Healthy Communities Wyandotte Education Action Team, and our goal is for every student and family in Wyandotte County to have access to quality education and support services that promote readiness for school, future education, and subsequent careers.
We must address disparities in early childhood inequities if we hope to have any impact on the long-term. Our future goal is to engage our business community and other community leadership in understanding how early childhood experiences shape our future health and our ability to thrive.
Our Team
Joanna Sabally
Program Coordinator
Healthy Communities Wyandotte
Coalition Coordinator
at the Wyandotte County Health Department
Irene Caudillo
Executive Director
El Centro, Inc
HCW Steering Committee and Education Action Team member
Lisa Garcia
Director of Student Services
USD 500
Our NLAPH
team:
HCW Steering Committee and Education Action Team member
These are the Action Teams working to make progress on poor health outcomes.
Emily Meissen-Sebelius
Program Coordinator, Weighing In
Children's Mercy Hospital
Weighing In and HCW's
Education Action Team formed a partnership to implement a grant from the Kansas Health Foundation in 2015, forming the basis of our Health Leadership Project for NLAPH.
Healthy Communities Wyandotte (HCW) is a community health improvement coalition convened by our mayor in 2011 after our county was ranked last in the first Kansas Health Rankings.
Project Liaison and Education Action Team member
Our Community: Wyandotte County
"I70Kansas" by Airtuna08 at en.wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:I70Kansas.JPG#/media/File:I70Kansas.JPG
- Wyandotte County is an urban community that encompasses all of Kansas City, KS.
- 23.4% of residents are below the poverty level, with the highest prevalence of children in poverty in the metro area (US Census).
- The county is truly diverse, with 24.8% African American, 27.3% Hispanic and 42.5% White and a large immigrant and refugee community.
- About 37% of children ages 2-19 are overweight or obese who are seen for well-child visits at Children's Mercy Primary Care clinics, compared with the national rate of about 32% for overweight and obesity in this age range. Rates of overweight and obesity are especially elevated for Wyandotte County Hispanic and black youth.