Implement the Plan – Chapter Overview

This is the point where you actually do the work outlined in your nutrition and physical activity plan. The information and materials in this chapter are designed to support you in implementing the plan. Moving to the Future: Nutrition and Physical Activity Program Planning breaks this chapter up into three topic areas – funding, doing, and managing.

 

Fund the Plan In this section you will find resources to help develop a budget and handle grants.

 

Carry Out the Interventions The section on carrying out the interventions includes a list of web-available resources that will help implement the activities in your plan. For example, you can find web links to health communication resources such as Making Health Communication Programs Work: A Planner’s Guide (National Cancer Institute’s “Pink Book”) or CDCynergy (a multimedia CD-ROM used for planning, managing, and evaluating public health communication programs).

 

Manage the Plan In the section on managing your plan you will find tools to help develop a timeline. This section also includes ideas on making the plan a useful document to you and your team.

TERMINOLOGY

Coalitions

People work together in a number of ways, in coalitions, partnerships, committees, teams, task forces, and so on. The tools in Moving to the Future will help you no matter how your group is structured. To make Moving to the Future friendly to people working together in different ways, we use these group terms interchangeably. So, if you are working in a formal committee and Moving to the Future uses the word team, the information applies to you as well.

Program

In Moving to the Future, the word program is defined broadly and could encompass any group of activities including projects, services, programs, and policy or environmental changes.

Nutrition and Physical Activity

In Moving to the Future, we often pair the wordnutrition with the phrase physical activity, as for example in “address the nutrition and physical activity needs” or “develop a nutrition and physical activity plan.” This does not suggest that these materials are only useful to people working on community-based nutrition AND physical activity programs. You can use the Moving to the Future resources to develop a plan focused only on nutrition or a plan focused only on physical activity. Moving to the Future provides guidance on a process–not on content. In fact, these materials could be adapted and used to develop a teen pregnancy prevention plan, for example, or a plan for any other community health priority.

Be Flexible & Realistic

Moving to the Future principles Flexible and Realistic are the bywords of this approach. The intent of Moving to the Future is to provide guidance. Use what is helpful and modify materials to meet your needs. Planning and implementing community-based programs is not work that can be done perfectly. Do the best you can, given your real-world limitations, and commit to making improvements every year.