The Get Healthy Initiative of The Lamar Institute

Mission Statement

Our mission is to engage local community partners, organizations, and businesses to work with the members of the community in developing a diffusible model of sustainable, effective health and wellness habits that lower American incidents of chronic illness and comorbid disease.  Our focus is researching and addressing the social and political determinants of health.  ​

Purpose

We are a community-based organization attempting to transform how Americans view health. Our goal is by starting with our local community we will construct a health and wellness model that can be integrated with other public health initiatives to expand health in America, not just health care. 

Program Offerings

Group fitness, community support partners, educational/motivational content, and goal setting and coaching are just a few services we are looking to provide and facilitate for mass community participation.

Community-Based Organization

As provided by Wilson, Lavis, Travers & Rourke, "Community-based organizations (CBOs) are important stakeholders in health systems and are increasingly called upon to use research evidence to inform their advocacy, program planning, and service delivery efforts. CBOs increasingly turn to community-based research (CBR) given its participatory focus and emphasis on linking research to action. In order to further facilitate the use of research evidence by CBOs, we have developed a strategy for community-based knowledge transfer and exchange (KTE) that helps CBOs more effectively link research evidence to action."

Wilson, M. G., Lavis, J. N., Travers, R., & Rourke, S. B. (2010). Community-based knowledge transfer and exchange: Helping community-based organizations link research to action. Implementation Science, 5(1), 33.
Our Model

Collaborative Governance

ACE Model of Allied Healthcare Continuum
Matthews, J., Bryant, C., Skinner, J., Green, D. (Eds.) (2019) The professional's guide to health and wellness coaching. 

Ansell, C. &, Alison, G. (2008). "'Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice' Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(4): 543-571" (PDF).​
As provided by Ansell and Alison, Collaborative Governance "is a governing arrangement where one or more public agencies directly engage non-state stakeholders in a collective decision-making process that is formal, consensus-oriented, and deliberative and that aims to make or implement public policy or manage public programs or assets.  This particular initiative is not initiated by a public agency but the purpose of this initiative is to construct a model for public administrators to use to engage their local community stakeholders in addressing local issues of public health."

Transformative Participatory Evaluation

According to Cousins and Whitmore, transformative participatory evaluation, "invokes participatory principles and actions in order to democratize social change...One important aim of [TPE] is to empower people through participation in the process of constructing and respecting their own knowledge and through their understanding of the connections among knowledge, power,  and control...A second key concept...all participants are contributors working collectively.  Initiating and sustaining genuine dialogue among actors leads to a deep level of understanding and mutual respect.  A third concept, critical reflection, requires participants to question, to doubt, and to consider a broad range of social factors, including their own biases and assumptions."
Our Model
Cousins, J. B., & Whitmore, E. (1998). Framing participatory evaluation. New directions for evaluation, 1998(80), 5-23.

Policy/Program Feedback Theory

Our Model
Wichowsky, A., & Moynihan, D. P. (2008). Measuring how administration shapes citizenship: A policy feedback perspective on performance management. Public Administration Review, 68(5), 908-920.
According to Wichowsky and Moynihan, "governments increasingly require administrators to develop outcome measurements that reflect a program’s impact on society. But standard approaches to performance measurement have neglected the impact on citizenship outcomes—the individual civic capacities and dispositions and social bonds of civic reciprocity and trust. The concept is adapted from the growing policy feedback literature in political science, which offers strong empirical evidence that certain policies have measurable effects on citizenship outcomes such as political participation, social capital, a sense of civic belonging, and self‐worth as a citizen."