Through involvement in the project, parents experienced what has been described as a self-transformation, realizing the power of an individual to shape her own health and her family’s health, and the power of a group to effect changes that shape the health of all children in the community. As a result of parents’ advocacy, school policies are changing to support the healthy lifestyles that can combat devastating epidemics of childhood obesity and asthma.

Much of the group’s work focused on advocating for Chicago Public Schools to adopt a meaningful wellness policy that included formal avenues for parent and community involvement at a school level. When the district adopted this policy, the group’s focus shifted to implementing the policy in a meaningful way, and on using it to create the changes necessary for a truly health-promoting environment in schools.

The ultimate goal of the Partnership is to change the way that health and wellness are addressed in schools so that schools offer an environment that promotes health. This goal involves meaningful change at a level that affects the health of entire communities, explained Dr. Dianne Rucinski, project external evaluator.

The Partnership’s method for achieving that goal is to provide the opportunity for individuals to experience healthy changes that lead to noticeable personal benefits and an increased awareness of the community-level factors—such as lack of access to fresh produce in the community and physical activity in school—that contribute to epidemics of asthma and obesity. With this awareness comes a motivation to participate in collective action to address those factors.

This approach, described in the public health community as the social-ecological model, allows the Partnership to focus simultaneously on individual and community issues while balancing short-term and long-term outcomes.

A key aspect of that experience is realizing that individual concerns are shared by others in the neighborhood —in other words, realizing that you’re not alone.

"I suffered the consequences of obesity myself, of type 2 diabetes," said Jovita Flores, the Partnership’s lead organizer in Little Village. "With this project, I realized my neighbors had the same problem. At school, other parents had the same problems, the same concerns for their children. This surprised me—because when I started, I thought it was just me."

Idida Perez, executive director of West Town Leadership United, explained that with information, this realization can lead to collective action. "Often," she said, "what appears to be a personal issue has community solutions."

This perspective is compatible with the organizing models central to the identity of the community groups involved in the project.

It also involves application of a an idea known in the public health world as the health belief model, in which one of the ways that individuals recognize the value of healthy behaviors is through having the opportunity to experience a behavior’s related benefits.

In this case, Partnership organizers led parents through health-promoting activities so they began to experience the benefits of healthy eating and physical activity. When parents created healthy lifestyles for their children at home, they noticed the ways in which those lifestyles diverged from the experiences and messages children received at school. With this observation, parents became motivated to advocate for changes that would make the school environment support—rather than contradict—the healthy lifestyles they believe in and work so hard to create at home.