Developing a Strategy Menu for Community-Level Obesity Prevention

Childhood obesity is a complex problem influenced by policies, systems, and environments across multiple settings. The prevention of childhood obesity requires changes across a range of community settings. To describe the development of an obesity prevention strategy menu that incorporates effective policy, systems, and environmental changes for reducing and preventing childhood obesity, and which offers the flexibility to consider local community needs and capacity. We describe the development of a strategy menu and some of the challenges of this process. We then elaborate on how communities will interact with the strategy menu and the development of a website to facilitate this interaction. No single discipline has all of the expertise needed to identify strategies for childhood obesity prevention. Therefore, a multidisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners reviewed evidence and organized a menu that assists communities in choosing complementary strategies tailored for efficacy in specific community settings. The strategies will eventually be part of a web-based point of access that complements the foundational relationships built between communities, researchers, and practitioners. The strategy menu is comprised of a set of effective approaches that communities can use to develop tailored, context-specific health interventions. By developing a framework to engage communities in the selection and implementation of multi-setting obesity prevention strategies, we aim to create and sustain momentum toward a long-term reduction in obesity in Wisconsin children.