Government Sector

Sexual Assault Prevention & Response Office
2018-Present

With RAND, we are working to develop comprehensive sexual violence prevention plans with pilot sites in each Department of Defense service branch. 

Collaboration and Funding with the RAND corporation, funded by the US Department of Defense

CDC, Office on
​Smoking and Health (OSH)
2016-Present

Aims to develop a readiness-based technical assistance (TA) process that helps Project Officers identify and act on readiness issues with their state grantees on developing and implementing tobacco policy.

Also, aims to incorporate readiness concepts into daily program planning and support activities learning across CDC.

Collaboration and Funding funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

United States
​ Air​ Force
2017-2019

Aimed to support all 93 USAF installations (and 17 Air National Guard installations) in developing an evidence-based process to develop installation-level integrated violence prevention and resilience plans and their implementation.

Collaboration and Funding with the RAND corporation and the US Department of Defense

​ReSolv
2017-Present

Aims to measure the relationship of readiness across multiple levels (individual, school, district) and across multiple stakeholders (teachers, students, parents) to school safety outcomes.

Collaboration and Funding with the American Institute for Research, funded by National Institute for Justice

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Non-Profit 

Carolina Family 
Engagement Center
(CFEC) 
2019-Present

Aims to provide ongoing capacity-building training and technical assistance in family engagement to districts, schools and families through the use of Getting To Outcomes® and organizational readiness assessments to increase the likelihood of desired outcomes.

Collaboration and Funding with U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement

Small Communities Forging Hyperlocal Data Collaboratives (SCHDC)
2020 - 2020

SCHDC looks to build the capacity of distressed communities in New Jersey, focusing on those with < 50,000 residents. Led by the New Jersey Health Initiatives, and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the SCHDC implementation team provides communities tools (including a data dashboard) and supports that a) illustrate healthy community characteristics, b) identify local gaps and challenges, and c) facilitate improvement goals to address upstream challenges to health and health equity. SCHCD fosters cross-sector collaboration and better data utilization. We are helping to lead the formative evaluation of this work used a mixed-methods approach we developed for SCALE, article published in the American Journal of Evaluation.   Learn more about NJHI with this quick and informative video!

Spreading Community Accelerators through Learning and Evaluation (SCALE)
2014-Present

Regions of Solution:  Aims to facilitate use of improvement techniques to develop community-based wellness, health, and equity.
States of Solution: Aims to build collaborations within states to develop state-level health equity plans. 

Collaboration and Funding with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Kids Teaching Kids
2020-2020

Serve & Connect
2018-Present

Kids teaching kids® is a partnership between Medical City Children's Hospital and the Greater Dallas Restaurant Association (GDRA) to engage youth in the development and dissemination of fun, nutritional snacks and menu options across all elementary schools and partner restaurants across Dallas. We are currently conducting an evaluability assessment of the program.

Collaboration with and funding by Medical City Healthcare.

Serve and Connect works to improve community health and resilience by fostering and improving relationships between first responders and community members.  Serve and Connect aims to build trusting, collaborative relationships that leverage community assets to create healthy communities.  The Wandersman Center works closely with S&C on ongoing and emergent evaluation issues. ​

Check out a report on their COMPASS initiative or you can read more about their work in our blog posts. 

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Research

Development and Validation of a Measure of Organizational Readiness (Motivation x Capacity) for Implementation
2018-Present

Despite the availability of evidence-based interventions (EBIs) for cancer control, EBI implementation and scale up remains a challenge. Implementation science aims to identify and understand factors that influence implementation success so that they can be addressed to improve outcomes. Unfortunately, gaps in measurement are a major barrier to improving understanding of such factors and developing strategies to address them.
 
Together with the University of Texas Health Sciences Center and the University of South Carolina Arnold School of Public Health,  we are developing a theoretically-informed, pragmatic, reliable and valid measure of organizational readiness that can be used across settings and topic areas, by researchers and practitioners alike, to increase and enhance implementation of cancer control interventions. This builds off previous work we have done developing the Readiness Diagnostic Scale. Generously funded by NIH R01-HSC-SPH-18-0006.

Enhancing Quality of Care Through Improved Health Literacy​​

2019-Present

Under the leadership of the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina, we are working to:

1. Understand clinic readiness for implementing a health literacy initiative
2. Implement an evidence-informed health literacy intervention
3. Increase provider awareness about health literacy and improve communication practices
4. Improve patient participation in health care encounters and health literacy. The health literacy initiative will be implemented in two phases

Phase 1 will determine patient communication needs and health care facilities readiness to implement an evidence-informed health literacy initiative through an electronic survey of clinics across South Carolina.
Phase 2 will involve implementation of this initiative to improve health literacy, patient-provider communication, and health outcomes. The program uses three basic questions (“What is my main problem?,” “What do I need to do about it?,” “Why is it important for me to do this?”) to help patients better understand their diagnosis and treatment plan. Twenty clinics will be selected to participate based on survey results, in-person interviews and site visits.  Read all about it at https://sph.sc.edu/health_literacy !

Generously funded by The Duke Endowment grant #6816-SP: