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Promising Practices

The Promising Practices database informs professionals and community members about documented approaches to improving community health and quality of life.

The ultimate goal is to support the systematic adoption, implementation, and evaluation of successful programs, practices, and policy changes. The database provides carefully reviewed, documented, and ranked practices that range from good ideas to evidence-based practices.
Learn more about the ranking methodology.

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Step It Up: Taking Steps to Healthy Success (Kansas City)

Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children

Goal: Kansas’s Step It Up: Taking Steps to Healthy Success (Step It Up) Project aims to work towards making improvements to policies and practices in child care programs with regard to breastfeeding, child nutrition, physical activity, outdoor learning, and reductions in screen time. Step It Up is an extension of the National Early Care and Education Learning Collaboratives Project (ECELC) and uses a similar learning collaborative model.

Impact: Step It Up: Taking Steps to Healthy Success has made great improvements in promoting healthy eating and physical activity. The topics of Child Nutrition and Infant & Child Physical Activity had the highest number of increases in best practices. Breastfeeding & Infant Feeding had the highest percentage of best practices being met at pre-assessment (55%).

Strategy: Community Beautification (USA)

Filed under Good Idea, Community / Crime & Crime Prevention, Families

Goal: The goal of beautification and restoration projects is to restore neighborhoods and communities in order to prevent criminal activity and encourage community engagement.

Strengthening Families Program (USA)

Filed under Effective Practice, Community / Social Environment, Children, Families, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: The goals of this program are to improve parenting skills and children’s behaviors and decrease conduct disorders; to improve children’s social competencies; and to improve family attachment, harmony, communication, and organization.

Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepeneurship (SAGE) (Chico, CA)

Filed under Effective Practice, Community / Civic Engagement, Children, Teens

Goal: The overall goal of the Students for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurship (SAGE) program is to establish a collaboration among high school students, college mentors, and local business leaders as the high school students complete experiential learning projects related to global entrepreneurship.

Summer Search (San Francisco, CA)

Filed under Effective Practice, Education / Educational Attainment, Teens, Urban

Goal: The mission of Summer Search is to find resilient low-income high school students and inspire them to become responsible and altruistic leaders by providing year-round mentoring, life-changing summer experiences, college advising, and a lasting support network.

Sunday Parkways (Chicago)

Filed under Good Idea, Health / Physical Activity, Children, Adults, Families, Racial/Ethnic Minorities

Goal: To bring a culture of physical activity to the Latino and African-American communities in Chicago in order to decrease health problems related to inactivity.

Sustainable Skylines Kansas City (Kansas City)

Filed under Good Idea, Environmental Health / Air, Urban

Goal: The goal of the Sustainable Skylines Initiative (SSI) is to achieve measurable emissions reductions and promote sustainability in urban environments within three years of implementation.

Switch-Play (Melbourne, Australia)

Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Children's Health, Children, Urban

Goal: The primary goal of the ‘Switch-Play’ promising practice was to develop and test three approaches towards the achievement of healthy weight maintenance among 10-year-old children: (1) through reducing the time spent in sedentary behaviors (e.g. TV viewing, playing electronic games and recreational computer use); (2) through increasing skills and enjoyment of physical activity; or (3) through a combination of these two strategies.

Impact: Children participating in the behavioral modification and motor skills development components of Switch-Play had improved BMI.

Syracuse Family Development Research Program (Syracuse, NY)

Filed under Good Idea, Education / Childcare & Early Childhood Education, Children

Goal: The goal of this program was to improve child and family functioning.

Tai Chi for Diabetes (Sydney, Australia)

Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Diabetes, Older Adults, Urban

Goal: The goal of the “Tai Chi for Diabetes” program was to improve health-related outcomes for
individuals diagnosed with type II diabetes in areas of mobility and physical function.

An Effective Practice meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes at a minimum: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program implementation steps, and outcomes that have demonstrated program success and/or promise in achieving the program goal in one or more localities.
  2. The results from an evaluation of the program include quantitative measures of improvement in outcome of interest (i.e. increase in voter registration, not just delivery of voter registration drive) and/ or the outcome measure is increased or improved compared to the baseline measurement or the control group but the difference is not statistically significant.

A Good Idea meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program funding source, program implementation steps and outcomes.
  2. The program evaluation is limited to descriptive measure(s) of success/accomplishment (i.e., program participation rates, number of services/education sessions/radio messages provided). Note: oftentimes, the program has been newly implemented and a program evaluation has not yet been conducted. Programs that have not yet been evaluated, but which show promise in improving health or quality of life, are classified as Good Ideas until an evaluation is conducted.

An Evidence-Based Practice meets the following HCI criteria:

  1. The program description includes at a minimum: the sponsoring organization, program goals, program implementation steps, and outcomes that have demonstrated program success in achieving the program goal in one or more localities.
  2. The results from an evaluation of the program include quantitative measures showing improvement in the outcome(s) of interest after the implementation of the program (i.e. increase in smoking cessation, not just the delivery of a smoking cessation program). The outcome measure(s) is/are compared at relevant time periods before and after the intervention or program implementation. Alternatively, the evaluation study compares the outcome(s) between an intervention group and an appropriate control group.
  3. The study is of peer-review quality and presents numbers in a scientific manner; measurements of precision and reliability are included (e.g. confidence intervals, standard errors), results from statistical tests show a significant difference or change in the outcome measure(s), and relevant point estimates and p-values are presented. Note: if the results from an evaluation of a program are presented in a scientific manner and the outcome measure is improved compared to the baseline measurement or the control group but the difference is not statistically significant, the practice is classified as effective and not evidence-based.