Case Study 6
Using MAPP to Get Up & Go! in St. Clair County
Funding for this story was provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under Cooperative Agreement Numbers 5U38HM000449-02 and HM08-80502CONT09. The contents of this document are solely the responsibility of the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsor.
St. Clair County Health Department (Illinois), as a county health department in Illinois subject to the state's Illinois Project for Local Assessment of Needs requirements, was well versed in strategic planning when staff first learned of Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP). While partnerships and collaboration were not new to St. Clair, with more than sixty health and human services organizations rooted in the county, MAPP presented a unique opportunity to engage community members and partners in collective assessment, planning, and action. Now, six years since the first MAPP meeting, the process is continuing to generate excitement as community members and local leaders collectively confront some of the most challenging public health issues.
Over the course of nine months, the St. Clair Health Care Commission, an appointed body that serves as the MAPP Steering Committee, facilitated a community visioning process, assessment design, and data collection and analysis. Findings from the four MAPP assessments were then used to identify six strategic issues that, when addressed, will help St. Clair County achieve its shared vision of a healthy community. Data points from the county's Community Themes and Strengths Assessment revealed perceived disparities in quality of life, safety risks, and a need to more effectively engage young people (Arras and Peters, 2009). Based on these data points and data from the other three MAPP assessments, a need for greater community connectedness emerged as the first strategic issue on the county's to-do list.
St. Clair County is part of the St. Louis Metropolitan Area and is composed of comingling urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. St. Clair encompasses more than 650 square miles and is home to 260,000 residents. Socioeconomic and environmental diversity define the region. Brownfields from former heavy industry, impoverished communities experiencing significant health inequities, and St. Louis “bedroom communities” all exist within the same county lines. Community leaders knew that cultivating a cohesive sense of community might be difficult in this varied landscape.
MAPP stakeholders began by developing an asset map to identify attributes that contribute to community connectedness in pockets of the county. Once equipped with a more acute understanding of the components that contribute to a shared sense of community in St. Clair, stakeholders began generating ideas for how to actualize community connectedness throughout the county. With assessment data in hand, stakeholders crafted a plan to improve community connectedness by collectively addressing two of the county's priority health issues: troubling rates of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases.
The Get Up & Go! campaign was conceived to answer the question “How can the county's health care community create a broader sense of community connectedness?” MAPP stakeholders developed a blueprint for a thirty-day fitness challenge designed to catalyze new investments in personal and community health and well-being. Within several months, the Get Up & Go! committee garnered two grants to promote the campaign, and a local Web designer was enlisted to develop the campaign's Web site, which now features announcements about local fitness events and resources, accounts of participant activities, local officials' endorsements, links to Internet resources, and more (Arras and Peters, 2009).
Getting Active and Getting Healthy Together
With thousands of Web site hits, a growing cadre of volunteers, and the pledged support of thirteen of nineteen mayors throughout the county, the campaign held its official kickoff event the following spring. The event included blood pressure and weight screenings and a group walk to dedicate a new walking trail. In less than a year, the campaign galvanized 110 teams—as small as a single family and as large as an entire town—representing twenty-three thousand individuals to join the effort to Get Up & Go! (Arras and Peters, 2009).
Two years after the official launch, the campaign was selected to join the YMCA's national Pioneering Healthy Communities initiative. As a result, community leaders were funded to participate in a policy training in Washington DC, and the campaign received a grant to develop policy-level strategies to nurture healthy lifestyles and promote community connectedness in St. Clair. The Get Up & Go! campaign has since expanded from a thirty-day challenge to an entire season of community events driven by growing partnerships between local government, community-based organizations, and residents. In addition, the campaign, now a freestanding coalition, has expanded to include a “policy arm” that recently hosted a community-wide health policy summit and has developed work groups to begin assessing and implementing policy-level healthy eating and active living strategies.
Beyond the anticipated outcomes, health department leaders argue that the MAPP process and associated campaign have nurtured goodwill between local mayors and county leadership and improved the county's ability to respond to public health emergencies. According to St. Clair County Health Department Executive Director Kevin Hutchison:
Relationships we developed through MAPP partnerships were extremely helpful during actual public health emergencies such as major power outages resulting from ice storms and the H1N1 pandemic. These relationships add distinct value to a local health department's ability to rapidly engage community partners and provide a unified foundation for the local public health system response to a public health emergency. MAPP is not something else we have to do. It is what we do in public health. It's not an extra step or another task; it's the essence of good public health practice.
Stakeholders in St. Clair County are preparing to launch into a second iteration of MAPP and are anxious to build stronger evaluation components into their process and more rigorously measure the impact of their work on health outcomes and community connectedness. When asked about the greatest outcomes of the process to date, Mark Peters, St. Clair County Health Department director of community health, replied that “we are much more community minded, and I think the community is much more public health minded.”
1. What was a major theme that emerged from St. Clair County's MAPP process?
2. What was the purpose of St. Clair County's Get Up & Go! campaign?
3. How did St. Clair County benefit from the relationships built through the MAPP process?