Outcomes of a Community-Wide Health Intervention in a Low-Income, Primarily Hispanic Community: The Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin (GAVA) Initiative.

Objectives: To describe outcomes of a 4-year physical activity (PA) and nutrition intervention (2013-2017) in Dove Springs, a low-income urban community in Texas.

Method: Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin is a place-based intervention targeting the built and social environments of PA and nutrition. Baseline and follow-up measures related to PA and nutrition were obtained from 357 parent-child dyads (final = 236) in the intervention community and a control community.

Design and evaluation of a coalition-led obesity initiative to promote healthy eating and physical activity in low-income, ethnically diverse communities: the Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin initiative.

Background: Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin (GAVA) is a coalition-led health initiative that targets low-income communities with disparities in access to healthy food and physical activity The purpose of this initiative was to increase healthy eating and physical activity among residents by facilitating access to food and physical activity opportunities through environmental and policy changes. Although GAVA is ongoing, this paper describes the original GAVA intervention and the 5-year evaluation study (2013-2018), presenting selected baseline data obtained through its cohort sub-study.

Methods: To assess the impact of GAVA, the evaluation plan included multiple sub-studies and involved collection of quantitative, qualitative, and observational data at different levels.

Designing Place-Based Interventions for Sustainability and Replicability: The Case of GO! Austin/VAMOS! Austin.

Place-based health efforts account for the role of the community environment in shaping decisions and circumstances that affect population well-being. Such efforts, rooted as they are in the theory that health is socially determined, mobilize resources for health promotion that are not typically used, and offer a more informed and robust way of promoting health outcomes within a community. Common criticisms of place-based work include the difficulty of , since engagement is so specific to a place, and limited of the work, in the absence of continued institutional structures, both within the community and supporting structures outside the community, to keep these initiatives resilient.

The assessment of diabetes knowledge and self-efficacy in a diverse population using Rasch measurement.

The purpose of this research was to develop survey instruments to evaluate diabetes knowledge and self-efficacy in a diverse population, and investigate the psychometric properties of data obtained with these instruments using Rasch measurement. Two-hundred and fifty-five urban-dwelling participants with diabetes were recruited to complete surveys through independent interviews. To evaluate the association of health literacy on metabolic control, formal literacy and hemoglobin A1c fingerstick testing were performed.