Katie Sanders, Tatevik Markosyan, and Alexa Lamm, members of the Healthier Together evaluation team, traveled to Calhoun, Clay, Dooly, Stewart, and Taliaferro counties during November to report findings from the 2021-2022 evaluation of the project. Healthier Together is a CDC-funded health promotion project led by Cooperative Extension to increase access to healthy foods and physical activity opportunities in rural Georgia.
As part of the 2021-2022 evaluation, the evaluation team collected community surveys within each county to determine the reach and uptake of project resources, as well as community awareness of the project. The team also conducted listening sessions with members of the community coalitions working with Extension to implement the Healthier Together project in each county. Results from the surveys and the listening sessions were presented at each meeting. An example infographic presented at the reporting meetings is below. Full evaluation reports and infographics for each county can be found on the Healthier Together website.
Katie Sanders also presented poetic representations of community feedback to help tell the story of the abstract impacts occurring within the project, such as community unification and strong social ties. These poems were constructed from the audio recordings of the listening sessions, using participants’ words to tell the story of Healthier Together. For more information about the poetic analysis process used, please explore Sanders’ publication on it here.
Tatevik Markosyan helped lead community visioning about the sustainability of the projects in each community. She helped participants at the meetings think about the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for increasing community resilience and health in the final year of the Healthier Together project. The product created by community members included mind maps (see figure below), where participants use a combination of words and drawings to vision a roadmap for the future.
The 2021-2022 evaluation report captured impacts that occurred over the fourth year of the project. Healthier Together is funded for five years, so the community mind maps helped solidify priority areas and desired community changes from participant perspectives to enhance momentum and sustainability of the impact of Healthier Together across all community sectors.
