Be Well Communities™: Mobilizing communities to promote wellness and stop cancer before it starts

Purpose Increasingly, cancer centers are delivering population-based approaches to narrow the gap between known cancer prevention strategies and their effective implementation. Leveraging successful healthy community initiatives, MD Anderson developed Be Well Communities™, a model that implements evidence-based actions to directly impact people’s lives. Methods In partnership with local organizations, MD Anderson’s Be Well Communities team executed and evaluated 16 evidence-based interventions to address community priorities in healthy diets, physical activity, and sun safety. Evaluation included assessing the effectiveness of evidence-based interventions, stakeholders’ perceptions of collaboration, and the population-level impact on dietary and physical activity behaviors among students using the School Physical Activity and Nutrition Survey and the System for Observing Fitness Instruction Time. Two-tailed t-tests were used to compare tested parameters at baseline and follow-up. p values less than .05 were considered significant. Results This model achieved its early outcomes, including effectively implementing evidence-based interventions, building strong partnerships, increasing access to healthy foods, improving the built environment, and increasing healthy food and water consumption and moderate to vigorous physical activity among students (p Conclusions Be Well Communities is an effective model for positively impacting community health which could be leveraged by others to deliver evidence-based actions to improve population health.