Preventing Childhood Obesity - Evidence Policy and Practice.pdf

CHAPTER 27
Community c apacity b uilding
Colin Bell, 1 Eva Elliott 2 and Anne Simmons 3
1 Department of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle, Wallsend, Australia
2 Cardiff Institute of Society and Health, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University,
Cardiff, UK
3 Deakin University School of Population Health, Melbourne, Australia
Summary and recommendations
for research and practice
• For healthy eating and physical activity to become
the norm for children, the places where they live,
learn and play need to foster these behaviors.
• Community capacity building for obesity prevention
in children is the process of building the competencies,
structures and resources in civil society
required to create these environments.
• Training is an important component of community
capacity building for obesity prevention, but it also
involves raising community awareness of health
risks, strategies to foster community cohesion, facilitating
access to additional resources, developing
structures to support community decision making
and social and political support.
• The application of community capacity building
models to obesity prevention is relatively new.
However, the number of programs that incorporate
its components into their designs is growing.
• At a national level, a network of creative and autonomous
communities that provide local solutions to
the global problem of obesity is more likely to
achieve significant and sustainable behavior change
than simply relying on central government.
Preventing Childhood Obesity. Edited by
E. Waters, B.A. Swinburn, J.C. Seidell and R. Uauy.
© 2010 Blackwell Publishing.
Introduction
To stem the growing epidemic of childhood obesity,
what children eat and the way they physically engage
with their home, school and neighborhood environments
needs to change. However, for healthy eating
and physical activity to become the norm, the places
where children live, learn and play need to provide the
cognitive, social and economic resources to foster
changes in existing behavior. This will not occur if the
knowledge and skills remain with the public health
specialists, government officials and researchers currently
driving efforts to prevent the epidemic. It will
occur if the collective capacity, knowledge and
resources of children, parents, residents, community
sector organizations, government agencies and health
experts are harnessed in order to understand the
problem and make changes. The process of building
the competencies, structures and resources in civil
society, as opposed to relying on market forces or state
intervention, is known as “ community capacity building
” and the aim of this chapter is to describe how the
components of community capacity building apply to
childhood obesity prevention.
What i s c ommunity
c apacity b uilding?
Community
Definitions and uses of the term “ community ” are
various, and with time there has been little agreement
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