Researchers working on UF's Family Health Self-Empowerment Project (FHSE) for Modifying and Preventing Obesity are gearing up for a series of workshops to be held during the spring semester and are hoping to involve 175 Gainesville families.
FHSE, led by Carolyn Tucker, a UF Distinguished Alumni professor, is designed to promote healthy living and improve health outcomes of largely low-income and minority families.
The research team, formed in summer 2006, now has more than 30 students and is roughly midway through the 11-phase, three-year project, she said.
Three workshops will be hosted in January and February at Lincoln Middle School in Gainesville said Raina Bhindi, a research assistant on the Workshop Subteam.
The families are required to attend pre-training for initial measurements, post-training to assess immediate effects of the workshops, and a six-month follow-up to measure long-term effects, Rivera-Cruz said.
"We're in an area of work where there are all kinds of programs and a lot of them are not very effective," said Ben Bloomberg, a research assistant on the Workshot Subteam. "I hope that our project will be effective and make an impact on these peoples' lives."
In order to reach even more people, the research team will be putting together a video from the workshops.
"Most likely the videos will not be distributed to individuals, but centers," Rivera-Cruz said.
The centers include doctor's offices and any location where there is a strong sense of community such as churches, youth groups, after-school programs, Boys and Girls Clubs and YMCAs, she said.
FHSE members have moved from preparation to training and received a ,1.1 million grant from the PepsiCo Foundation to conduct 18 local focus groups, where they determine health motivators and barriers.
Then the group distributed a pilot survey in the Gainesville area, from which it made a shortened national survey to determine whether the motivators and barriers found locally translated on a national scale, she said.
"I'm excited to see it all come together," Blomberg said. "It's probably one of the most worthwhile things I've done in my undergraduate career."
