Promising Practices
The Promising Practices database informs professionals and community members about documented approaches to improving community health and quality of life.
The ultimate goal is to support the systematic adoption, implementation, and evaluation of successful programs, practices, and policy changes. The database provides carefully reviewed, documented, and ranked practices that range from good ideas to evidence-based practices.
Learn more about the ranking methodology.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Adolescent Health, Teens, Urban
Goal: The goal of the Teen Health Project is to provide adolescents with the skills necessary to prevent HIV risk behaviors.
Impact: The Teen Health Project shows that community-level interventions that include skills training and engage adolescents in neighborhood-based HIV prevention activities can produce and maintain reductions in sexual risk behavior, including delaying sexual debut and increasing condom use.
Filed under Effective Practice, Health / Alcohol & Drug Use, Children, Adults
Goal: The Mission of California's Tobacco Control Section (TCS) is to improve the health of all Californians by reducing illness and premature death attributable to the use of tobacco products.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Diabetes, Adults, Older Adults, Racial/Ethnic Minorities
Goal: The Diabetes Self-Management Program is a group workshop that educates individuals with diabetes on techniques to help them manage their disease and live more active lives.
Filed under Effective Practice, Community / Domestic Violence & Abuse, Families
Goal: The mission of DAIP is to provide advocacy on behalf of battered women. DAIP staff provide information and assess the women's safety regardless of the situation, but they also offer advocacy at three key time periods: immediately after police intervention and arrest, throughout the court proceedings, and after case disposition. The advocates offer support and information about available community resources, explain the criminal court process, describe the civil court remedies available, and obtain information from the women in order to serve as their liaisons to the legal system and to ascertain the level of danger that each woman is in.
Filed under Effective Practice, Community / Crime & Crime Prevention, Adults, Urban
Goal: The mission of The Fortune Society is to support successful reentry form prison and promote alternatives to incarceration, thus strengthening the fabric of our communities.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Diabetes, Adults, Families, Urban
Goal: The goal of the Healthy Diabetes Plate was to increase understandability and accessibility of diabetes nutrition education for people living with diabetes.
Impact: The Healthy Diabetes Plate curriculum solves two problems encountered in diabetes education — understandability and accessibility. Participants were able to correctly plan breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals and improved their intake of fruit and vegetables.
Filed under Good Idea, Health / Health Care Access & Quality
Goal: As medicine becomes more complex and specialized by the minute, the communication gulf between doctors and their patients is becoming progressively insurmountable. The Stanford Internet-based Successful aging (iSAGE) project is a project aimed at improving quality of life and quality of care for all older Americans from diverse backgrounds. iSAGE offers an entirely web-based, video rich immersion training in the principles of successful aging for the general public as well as health workers. It is unique in that it allows learners to specialize in the health and health care of thirteen different ethno-cultural groups commonly seen in the US.
Filed under Good Idea, Health / Children's Health, Children
Goal: Launched in the fall of 2002, the plan, Moving Our Children Toward a Healthy Weight: Finding the Will and the Way, calls for a multilevel approach to reducing the number of overweight and obese children. It focuses not only on behavioral and interpersonal change, but also on the organizational, community, and societal changes necessary to support healthy eating habits and increased physical activity for children, teens, and their families.
Filed under Good Idea, Community / Transportation
Goal: The goal of the Coalition is to give citizens a real choice regarding the mode of transportation they elect for traveling to work, school, or recreaton as well as to encourage healthier lifestyles and a cleaner environment.