In addition to the infographic, these other communication tools help keep the momentum going in the following ways:
The Community Nutrition Report Card is a really good conversation starter. It gives me a reason to start a conversation with different organizations, rather than just calling them out of the blue and being like, ‘hey, want to talk about healthy eating environments?’
When you see something that’s not great, you can’t just call someone out on it.It’s easier when you have something like the report card to be like ‘this is why I’m here, and we assessed a bunch of other settings.’ So that people don’t feel like it’s just them— its communitywide approach. So, I think that’s very useful.
It’s just nice that it’s not my opinion, it is a group’s opinion. So, you can say ‘here’s our report card. It includes recommendations from private and government agencies. Everybody’s kind of agreed that this is our score and where we could be.’ It’s pretty hard to dodge those resultsor argue them. When you’re having a conversation with parents or other stakeholders…it basically comes across like gospel. This is our report card and this where we want to get to. It’s nice.
It would be a little harder to hear the results of the Community Nutrition Report Card if every other school in town got an A+, and we got a D. It was easier knowing that every school can make improvements, and that there’s faults with all of us. It kind of shows us that we can all get better. We can all work together through the process and share some common practices.
We [participant and dietitian] talk quite regularly because of the report card. We talk about how to improve things in our setting—because I think we scored a D minus. And the dietitian just gave me some little tricks that could help us improve our report card. And I say report card, but it’s going to improve the services.
The school’s canteen operator, she pays monthly rent to the school to run her own thing there. So, I value the fact that she needs to make money, otherwise she’s going to walk away from it… So that’s kind of the tough part… trying to work with to maintain her profits and make it viable for her, while trying to become more nutritious. For example, she’s invested in these slush machines. So if we banned slushies, it would obviously be a loss for her. So, her idea was to try smoothies instead of slushies.
She’s (setting stakeholder) usually able to kind of digest the information and come back with something that is much healthier in place of what she had. Maybe not perfect, but a good middle ground for the time being as we kind of move towards the final goal.
We can look at the Community Nutrition Report Card and think, ‘Okay, this is how we were doing in 2019. Now it’s 2022, how far have we come from there?’ I think the Community Nutrition Report Card is a good tool to use as a reminder of the need to continue moving forward and to get better. But it gives us something to move forward from.