ARTICLEHEALTH PROMOTION PRACTICE / MONTH YEAR42April Evaluating the California Wellness Foundation’s Health Improvement Initiative: A Logic Model Approach

The difficulties of conducting randomized trials to eval-uate community-based initiatives have led some researchers to argue in favor of a case study “logic model ” approach to evaluation. This article describes a case study logic approach adopted for the evaluation of one community initiative, the Health Improvement Ini-tiative (HII) funded by the California Wellness Founda-tion (TCWF). The HII is a comprehensive, community-based initiative designed to improve population health by implementing and sustaining community-level sys-tems changes. Nine communities received funding to create broad-based community coalitions (Health Part-nerships) that were charged with developing and imple-menting action plans around systems change. The HII is being evaluated using a case-study logic-model approach that uses quantitative and qualitative data to construct indicators of coalition functioning, systems changes, and population health. By examining the rela-tionship between these indicators over time, it should be possible to determine if any changes in intermediate or long-term outcomes are associated with Health Partner-ship activities