Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Older Adults, Older Adults

Goal: The goal of EnhanceFitness is to encourage older adults to engage in regular physical activity to improve their health and well-being.

Impact: EnhanceFitness participants reported a 13% improvement in social function, a 52% improvement in depression, and a 35% improvement in physical functioning. Additionally, participants' healthcare costs were 21% less than those of non-participants after one year.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Respiratory Diseases, Children, Urban

Goal: The EDM program integrates asthma education into elementary school core curriculum with the intentions of raising asthma awareness and increasing asthma management knowledge.

Impact: The EDM program provides students the opportunity to increase knowledge and develop health literacy about asthma as well as expand the availability of resources for teachers.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Economy / Poverty, Adults, Women, Men, Families, Urban

Goal: The goal of the Family Peer Support program is to increase family economic and social self-sufficiency, and to connect parents to needed physical health, behavior health, and educational resources for their child. Family peer support programs generally focus on fostering encouragement of personal responsibility and self-determination, improving family health and wellness, and supporting engagement and communication with providers and systems of care. Research shows that peer support programs promote empowerment and self-esteem, self-management, engagement and social inclusion, as well as improving the social networks of families who receive these services. Research evidence qualifies peer support services as evidence-based through the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality guidelines.

Salzer MS, Schwenk E, Brusilovskiy E: Certified peer specialist roles and activities: results from a national survey. Psychiatric Services 61:520–523, 2010.
Repper J, Carter T: A review of the literature on peer support in mental health services. Journal of Mental Health 20: 392–411, 2011.
Cook JA: Peer-delivered wellness recovery services: from evidence to widespread implementation. Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal 35:87–89, 2011

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Food Safety, Children, Families, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: The goal of the Fight BAC! campaign is to educate the public about four basic practices - clean, separate, cook and chill - that reduce the risk of foodborne illness.

Impact: The study showed that culturally competent, social marketing campaigns are likely to improve awareness, knowledge, and attitudes around food safety among Latino consumers.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Mental Health & Mental Disorders, Children

Goal: The mission of the Institute on Violence and Destructive Behavior (IVDB) is to empower schools and social service agencies to address violence and destructive behavior, at the point of school entry and beyond, in order to ensure safety and to facilitate the academic achievement and healthy social development of children and youth. The primary goal of this program is to divert antisocial kindergartners from an antisocial behavior pattern during their subsequent school careers and to develop in them the competencies needed to build effective teacher- and peer-related, social-behavioral adjustments.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Physical Activity, Children

Goal: To improve children's nutritional status, increase their activity level, enhance their self-esteem, and create life-long health habits by using a multidisciplinary, community- and family-based system approach, and by engaging local health care professionals with community agencies.

Impact: The Fit Kids/Fit Families program shows that multidisciplinary, community- and family-based approaches to children's exercise, weight, & nutrition can have an effect on healthier nutritional choices, increased physical activity, decreased sedentary activity, healthier behaviors, and BMI reductions.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Education / Student Performance K-12, Teens, Rural

Goal: The goal of the program is to intervene in the lives of high-school dropouts and provide them with the values, life skills, education, and self-discipline necessary to succeed.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Women's Health, Women, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: The goal of the FoCaS Project is to improve breast and cervical cancer screening participation among low-income women.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Community / Governance, Children, Urban

Goal: To advocate for children and help them resolve their most pressing legal problem: being in the custody of the state when they need to be in the custody of a family - biological or adoptive - within the 12 months provided by law.

Impact: Children represented by the Foster's Children Project were more likely to exit the foster system to permanency due to higher rates of adoption and long-term custody, but not reunification, than their peers not represented by FCP.

Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children

Goal: The goal of the FRIENDS Programs is to teach cognitive-behavioral skills to reduce anxiety in elementary school students who are or were exposed to violence.

Impact: The FRIENDS Programs and specific studies of them indicate that school-based anxiety prevention programs can increase standardized mathematics achievement scores, decrease life stressors, and reduce victimization by community violence in children.