What I spent my semester doing...

Prior to starting school last fall I posted an overview of the field of public health that I am focusing on, health behavior and health education. Now that I am less than a week away from the end of my first half of grad school, I thought I would share the projects I am working on this semester. They are VERY hands on, and should give a better sense of what my field is all about.

Two courses will be covered, the other three aren't nearly as interesting.

HBHE 641: Materials and Methods

This course is basically about how to evaluate and create effective and appropriate health education materials.

Each group was given a community agency to work with, and my group worked with Allegiance Health, the hospital/health system located in Jackson, MI. Allegiance heads up the Health Improvement Organization of Jackson County, and they were looking for a campaign to promote physical activity, healthy eating, and stress management.

My group decided that we want to focus on promoting local resources and finding ways to make healthy choices that make sense for your life.

We started with the idea of a print campaign. We wanted to take photographs of Jackson residents modeling healthy behaviors. As a tying slogan we had the idea "ReThink" health. For instance, we wanted to promote things like playing in the snow with your kids as a way to get physical activity.

After pitching the idea to our contact at Allegiance, we decided to add a website to the campaign. For each of the three topic areas we provided educational material, as well as links to and information about local resources.

Enough with the words though, here's the result...

Print ads (click each ad for a larger view):

The website we created can be viewed here. This is purely a mock-up, and there is no guarantee it will be used by the organization. As a group we decided what we wanted the website to contain, how we wanted it to look, and wrote all of the educational material. Our professor paid for a web designer (a U of M senior who does this as a hobby), to work with us to create the website. In addition, every group had a budget of $200 to create the project. Ours was spent on hosting a focus group to test our materials, providing a thank-you gift for Jess, and a few dollars spent on printing the ads to present in class. This class was amazing.

My internship this summer will actually be with this organization, and I will be focusing my work on materials creation, so I may get a chance to continue work on this project!

The next course will covered in a different post, I'm sure the suspense is killing you ;)