Developing, implementing and evaluating health promotion resources for high school students in the Northern Territory

Developing, implementing and evaluating health promotion resources for high school students in the Northern Territory

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Developing, implementing and evaluating health promotion resources for high school students in the Northern Territory

The Cancer Council Northern Territory invited Community Works to support a program they developed, the School Smoking Education Program (SSEP). The purpose of the program was to educate students through evidence-based information about the harmful impacts of cigarette smoke and e-cigarette vapours. The target audience was 12-16 year olds, focussed on students in years 7, 8, 9 and 10 attending schools in Darwin and Palmerston.

The program was implemented into the school curriculum and it ran over four lessons covering topics that included the health implications of tobacco, chemicals and nicotine addiction, social determinants of health, societal factors in tobacco use and smoking cessation methods. The intended outcome of the program was to reduce the number of adolescents who take up smoking and increase the number who quit smoking if they are already smokers.

Cancer Council NT staff designed the program and delivered the sessions in each school. Community Works supported them through the design of resources for the program and by assisting with the evaluation of student responses to the program in each school. The design and framing of resources by Community Works carefully considered literature on the key concerns and most important issues impacting adolescents aged 12-16. For example, this included an emphasis on concerns about the environment and about family members becoming seriously ill. The resources also took into consideration the increasing trend of adolescents to take up e-cigarettes or vaping.

Examples of the resources are shown below. They were designed for use across multiple formats including as posters, magnets and pamphlets, as well as on social media.

In addition, the flyer provided to all students included explanations of the wider social and environmental effects of tobacco production and use.

Cancer Council NT considered an evaluation of the program to be very important as a means of gauging how well the materials had been understood by students and what the likely impacts would be on their knowledge, attitudes and behaviours relating to smoking. An evaluation would also help to show any changes or improvements that could be made to the program in the future.

As an engaging and efficient strategy for the evaluation, we recommended choosing a small number of questions and then putting them to students through Mentimeter, an online platform that enables a range of question-types to be developed, such as open-ended, survey or multiple-choice questions. Mentimeter enables responses from a group of people to be immediately presented and analysed according to different formats that could be chosen in advance by Cancer Council NT staff. For example, one question asked students to write down three words that represented their reactions to the program. The format we chose to present the results was a word cloud like the one below, with most common reactions shown in larger font.

This approach was engaging to students because they could respond anonymously to questions using mobile phones or tablets and the combined responses could then be projected on a screen and discussed with the group as a whole. Given the limitations of time available within a school timetable, each evaluation was scheduled to only require twenty minutes at the end of the final session. After evaluations were completed in all four schools, Community Works produced a short report that summarised the findings.

We anticipate that our relationship with Cancer Council NT will continue into a further phase of work as the organisation scales up its work to reach more schools and students in the future.  

The Stronger Communities for Children Program Storybook

The Stronger Communities for Children Program Storybook

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The Stronger Communities for Children Program Storybook

Stronger Communities for Children (SCfC) is a community development program in ten participating Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory of Australia. The program supports safe and healthy communities, families and children. It ensures that local people are in control of local decision making.

The program has been operating since 2013, over which time the Local Community Boards in each community have made decisions on investments in a very diverse range of activities, depending on local needs and priorities for families and their children. Examples include education programs for parents, after-school support for children, health promotion and awareness activities, cooking and nutrition programs, support to strengthen the use of local languages in schools and social enterprises in skateboarding and hairdressing, as part of a wide array of initiatives across the ten communities.

A challenge for the program has been to document the impact of such widely differing activities across a vast geographical area and for communities that have distinct priorities. Working with Ninti One, the organisation with responsibility for supporting the program, we developed two strategies for providing a measure of impact across the program.

Stronger Communities for Children: Monitoring, evaluation and learning model "Wheel of Measures"

The second strategy was to collect impact stories for inclusion in a report we called the SCfC Storybook . We worked with each community to generate stories about the difference that their SCfC activities had made. This made the information generated different from information usually presented in reports, which share stories about what happened rather than the difference made or the impact achieved.

Stronger Communities for Children: Community activities

The result was the Storybook that we produced with Ninti One as a milestone publication for Stronger Communities for Children. It included the contributions of many people working for the program in each community, especially people delivering the activities and members of the Local Community Boards.

Please see the Community Works blog for reflections on the experience and what we learned for future impact assessment work.

Book
Read the Snapshot
Book
Read the full Storybook

Online workshops for Ninti One

Online workshops for Ninti One

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Online workshops for Ninti One

Community Works has been a partner of Ninti One for several years. We have worked with the organisation as it has developed and managed programs that have created economic opportunity, improved service delivery and boosted the livelihoods of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people across Australia.

An important part of our contribution has been to support to planning and training processes for organisations across Australia. Given the distances involved in reaching people living in the most remote and isolated parts of the country, online methods of work have always been a part of the mix of methods we have used.  Recently, we have translated more of the workshop-based planning and training materials to online access, a process that been very rewarding.

Three of the approaches we have adopted have been especially effective:

Online canvases

It has been valuable to share a single canvas with a group of people online in which all the content you wish to discuss is included. This means it needs to be a big space. Navigating around the canvas and focussing in on the relevant section enables a smooth transition from one topic to the next, with comments and points of discussion recorded on the canvas as we progress. We have found Mural to be a valuable platform for these kinds of processes (see the example on the right). Recent examples of session content includes in-depth research planning with three community organisations in the Northern Territory. 

Remotely-facilitated workshops

Facilitating a training or process workshop through remote video presents challenges, but they can be overcome with good planning in advance. Having the facilitators in one location and the participants in another means that the quality of the connection needs to be adequate, including the audio quality. Pacing the workshop in a way that prevents in turning into a lecture is critical, so that the participants are not worn down by the experience of watching the materials displayed on the screen. This means that breaking up for group exercises, posing questions to the group on a regular basis and inviting people to watch a video and then come up with their questions and comments are essential to the process.

Narrated presentations

Probably undervalued as a method, we have found narrated slides to be very effective as a flexible way for individuals to engage with material in a time and at a pace that suits them. We have developed online materials of this kind for the National Best Practice Unit for Tackling Indigenous Smoking, which is managed by Ninti One. The approach draws on the methods we have refined through the online masters course in cross-cultural conflict resolution we have delivered for James Cook University in recent years.

Our successful work with Ninti One is likely to see more online methods being developed for an increasingly wide range of topics including research, service improvement, evaluation, project management and various training courses.

ConnectED; support for better quality, access and relevance of education in Central America

ConnectED; support for better quality, access and relevance of education in Central America

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ConnectED; support for better quality, access and relevance of education in Central America

After several years of learning from the achievements of its program in rural areas of Nicaragua, in 2019 the Raechel and Jackie Foundation became ConnectED. At the same time, the organisation embarked on a new phase of work in Guatemala that focuses on further testing and proving of its community-based model implemented with local education leaders known as Fellows.

As part of this process of change, ConnectED invited Community Works to collaborate across a range of activities designed to establish and sustainable and high-impact long-term strategy. Starting with Spring Impact methods to analyse and plan the scaling of the work in Nicaragua to Guatemala, we broadened our work for ConnectED to include:

  • Research on comparative education models
  • Interviews with key individuals on the impact and future directions of ConnectED
  • Preparation of a strategy and business plan
  • Development of key strategy components including the Theory of Change, logic model and M&E metrics
  • Design of communication materials, including a prospectus for potential local partners
  • Preparation of training materials for workshops in Guatemala
  • Contributions to plans for fundraising. 

We worked closely with the ConnectED team throughout this process, building great team spirit and collective effort. 

At the time of preparation of this short summary, Community Works has been involved with ConnectED for over a year and Steve Fisher has joined the Advisory Council of ConnectED. We anticipate continuing our partnership as the organisation delivers against its strategic objectives and makes a difference to the way that communities in Central America achieve better quality, access and relevance of local education.