Project: Sarasota County Youth Fitness Program
Project Director: Carol Bryant, PhD
Location: Sarasota County, Florida
The Sarasota County Youth Obesity Project mirrored the Kentucky Tweens Project in many ways. The FPRC worked with a coalition of more than 60 groups and individuals focused on chronic disease, diabetes, obesity, nutrition, physical activity, or youth. The coalition was brought together in May 2003 by the Sarasota County Health Department and met on a monthly basis to maintain an articulation among the various groups and organizations.
A subset of this coalition's members came together to form a CBPM committee that examined the importance, desirability, and feasibility of implementing CBPM to address the problem of obesity in youth between the ages of 9 and 13 (similar to the "tween" project underway in Kentucky). One of the FPRC's overarching aims is to assess whether a community already familiar with the principles of CBPM can adapt them quickly to address other health-related problems in the community, and the Sarasota project facilitated this assessment.
Materials
Baldwin, J., Nickelson, J., Alfonso, M., Bryant, C. A., French, J., Hogeboom, D., McCormack Brown, K., McDermott, R. J. & Pitt Barnes, S. (2006, November). VERB Summer Scorecard: The Sarasota County Youth Obesity Prevention Project. Paper presented at the annual American Public Health Association Conference, Boston, MA. [Download in PDF Format]
Florida Prevention Research Center. (2006). Comprehensive evaluation report for the 2005 Sarasota County VERB Summer Scorecard Program. University of South Florida, Florida Prevention Research Center, Tampa. [Download in PDF Format]
Florida Prevention Research Center. (2006, April). Evaluation of the Sarasota County Youth Obesity Prevention Project. Report to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Prevention Research Center Office. [Download in PDF Format]