Community coalition efforts to prevent childhood obesity: two-year results of the Shape Up Under 5 study.

BACKGROUND: Cross-sector collaborations and coalitions are promising approaches for childhood obesity prevention, yet there is little empirical evidence about how they affect change. We hypothesized that changes in knowledge of, and engagement with, childhood obesity prevention among coalition members can diffuse through social networks to influence policies, systems, and environments. METHODS: We studied a community coalition (N = 16, Shape Up Under 5 "SUU5 Committee") focused on early childhood obesity prevention in Somerville, MA from 2015-17. Knowledge, engagement, and social network data were collected from Committee members and their network contacts (n = 193) at five timepoints over two years. Policy, systems, and environment data were collected from the SUU5 Committee. Data were collected via the validated COMPACT Stakeholder-driven Community Diffusion survey and analyzed using regression models and social network analysis. RESULTS: Over 2 years, knowledge of (p = 0.0002), and engagement with (p = 0.03), childhood obesity prevention increased significantly among the SUU5 Committee. Knowledge increased among the Committee's social network (p = 0.001). Significant changes in policies, systems, and environments that support childhood obesity prevention were seen from baseline to 24 months (p = 0.003). CONCLUSION: SUU5 had positive effects on "upstream" drivers of early childhood obesity by increasing knowledge and engagement. These changes partially diffused through networks and may have changed "midstream" community policies, systems, and environments.

Implementing Group Model Building With the Shape Up Under 5 Community Committee Working to Prevent Early Childhood Obesity in Somerville, Massachusetts.

OBJECTIVE: To describe our process of using group model building (GMB) with the Shape Up Under 5 Committee; measure the effects on Committee members; and describe the community-wide health messaging campaign that resulted from the process. DESIGN: Pilot study. SETTING: Somerville, Massachusetts. PARTICIPANTS: Members of the Shape Up Under 5 Committee, a multisector group of professionals. INTERVENTION: Research team convened the Committee and facilitated GMB from October 2015 to June 2017. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Boundary objects produced during GMB activities; committee members' perspectives on early childhood obesity in their community; and Committee members' knowledge, engagement, and trust at the conclusion of each meeting. RESULTS: Working together using GMB activities and with support from the research team, the Committee created a community-wide campaign that provided evidence-based messages to reach an entire city that emphasized diversity and reaching immigrants and community members who spoke languages other than English. More than 80% of Committee members reported changes in their perspectives related to early childhood obesity at the conclusion of the pilot test. Six perspective shift themes emerged from interviews and open-ended survey items: exposure to new perspectives about challenges community members face; increased awareness of others working on similar issues; increased knowledge about early childhood obesity; seeing value in creating a space to work across sectors; appreciating complexity and linkages between early childhood obesity prevention and other community issues; and how participation in committee influences members' priorities in their own work. Knowledge of and engagement with early childhood obesity prevention varied at the conclusion of each meeting, as did increases in trust among Committee members. CONCLUSION: Group model building is a promising approach to support multisector groups working to address early childhood obesity in their community. Meeting activities may have had differential impacts on members' knowledge of and engagement with early childhood obesity.

Implementing a stakeholder-driven community diffusion-informed intervention to create healthier, more equitable systems: a community case study in Greenville County, South Carolina.

This case study describes the application of a theory-informed, stakeholder-driven intervention with a group of 19 multi-sector stakeholders from an existing coalition to promote whole-of-community change that supports childhood obesity prevention. The intervention applied community-based system dynamics to design and implement activities that promoted insights into the systems driving childhood obesity prevalence and helped participants prioritize actions to influence those systems. This led to three new priority areas for the coalition: addressing food insecurity; building power among historically marginalized voices within the community; and supporting advocacy efforts to promote community-wide change beyond the coalition's previous focus on organizational-level policy, systems and environment change. The intervention spurred the application of community-based system dynamics to other health issues and in partner organizations, which demonstrates paradigm shifts about how to address complex public health issues in the community.

Using Agent-Based Modeling to Extrapolate Community-Wide Impact from a Stakeholder-Driven Childhood Obesity Prevention Intervention: Shape Up Under 5.

Objective: Whole-of-community interventions are a promising systems-based approach to childhood obesity prevention. A theorized driver of success is "Stakeholder-Driven Community Diffusion" (SDCD): the spread of knowledge about and engagement with obesity prevention efforts from a committee of stakeholder representatives. We focus on the potential of SDCD to affect the broader community. Methods: We use an agent-based model of SDCD to dynamically represent the interpersonal interactions that drive community diffusion of knowledge and engagement. We test its explanatory power using longitudinal data from a sample of community members and then use simulations to extrapolate from this limited sample to the unobserved community at large. We also consider counterfactual scenarios that show how changes in implementation strategy might have led to different patterns of community change. Results: Our model can reproduce real-world patterns of diffusion. Simulations show a substantial increase in knowledge (an approximate doubling) and a slight increase in engagement throughout the broader community. A relatively small amount of this change in knowledge (∼10%), and all the change in engagement is attributable to direct intervention effects on committee members. Conclusions: SDCD is premised on creating preconditions for sustainable change. Previous work has estimated impact on small samples closely linked to the stakeholder committee, but the degree to which this translates into the much broader diffusion envisioned by SDCD theory is unknown. This analysis demonstrates the potential of interventions to do just that. Additionally, the counterfactual scenarios suggest that simulation can help tailor implementation of SDCD interventions to increase impact.

Design and methods of Shape Up Under 5: Integration of systems science and community-engaged research to prevent early childhood obesity.

Shape Up Under 5 (SUU5) was a two-year early childhood obesity prevention pilot study in Somerville, Massachusetts (2015-2017) designed to test a novel conceptual framework called Stakeholder-driven Community Diffusion. For whole-of-community interventions, this framework posits that diffusion of stakeholders' knowledge about and engagement with childhood obesity prevention efforts through their social networks will improve the implementation of health-promoting policy and practice changes intended to reduce obesity risk. SUU5 used systems science methods (agent-based modeling, group model building, social network analysis) to design, facilitate, and evaluate the work of 16 multisector stakeholders ('the Committee'). In this paper, we describe the design and methods of SUU5 using the conceptual framework: the approach to data collection, and methods and rationale for study inputs, activities and evaluation, which together may further our understanding of the hypothesized processes within Stakeholder-driven Community Diffusion. We also present a generalizable conceptual framework for addressing childhood obesity and similar complex public health issues through whole-of-community interventions.