Vision Statement: To cultivate a collaborative effort to improve the quality and breadth of community-based obesity prevention.
What is a Community-based Obesity Prevention Initiative?
CO-OPS defines community-based obesity prevention initiatives as initiatives that seek to promote healthy eating and physical activity, in a way that would be expected to influence energy balance thus contributing to the prevention of obesity at the population level. The type of initiatives or programs that the CO-OPS Collaboration focuses on are those that consider the socio-cultural and environmental determinants of obesity within a setting or population group, rather than those with a focus solely on individual behaviour change or weight loss (treatment).
CO-OPS includes practitioners, funders and evaluators of programs which have obesity prevention as part of their objectives as well as healthy eating and physical activity programs which contribute to obesity prevention.
The CO-OPS Collaboration acknowledges that there are a range of different interventions throughout Australia of varying size and scope, each with an important role in community-based obesity prevention. The CO-OPS Collaboration aims to develop resources and support systems that account for these differences.
Knowledge translation and exchange
The CO-OPS Collaboration has employed a Knowledge Broker who is available to CO-OPS sites to assist with advice and support and facilitate the knowledge translation process.
CO-OPS aims to harness the use of research and evidence to improve the planning, implementation and evaluation of community-based obesity prevention initiatives.
CO-OPS endeavours to create a support system that will accelerate the use of knowledge, evidence and evaluation by those involved in community-based obesity prevention.
We aim to effectively share information and evidence with participating sites through a wide variety of communications including:
- Publish and communicate widely (including through scientific conferences, journals and the media) on best practices approaches to community-based obesity prevention;
- Provision of on-going support and advice services for new community-based projects;
- Maintenance of an up to date evidence-based website, training tools and resources;
- Provision of online facilitated forums;
- Review of previous best practices to ensure currency and validity;
- Development of evidence-based summaries of community-based projects; and
- Maintenance of continuous knowledge sharing capabilities.