Evaluability assessment of “growing healthy communities,” a mini-grant program to improve access to healthy foods and places for physical activity

BACKGROUND: Mini-grants have been used to stimulate multisector collaboration in support of public health initiatives by funding non-traditional partners, such as economic development organizations. Such mini-grants have the potential to increase access to healthy foods and places for physical activity through built environment change, especially in small and rural towns in the United States. Although a promising practice, few mini-grant evaluations have been done. Therefore, our purpose was to conduct an Evaluability Assessment (EA), which is a process that can help promising programs that lack evidence advance toward full-scale evaluation. Specifically, we conducted an Evaluability Assessment of a statewide mini-grant program, called “Growing Healthy Communities” (GHC), to determine if this program was ready for evaluation and identify any changes needed for future implementation and evaluation that could also inform similar programs. METHODS: Telephone interviews with directors of six past mini-grant recipient organizations were conducted to assess implementation and evaluability. The six interviews were split equally among agencies receiving funding for food-oriented projects and physical activity-oriented projects. Within- and cross-case thematic analyses of interview transcripts were conducted. RESULTS: Organizational capacity was a universal theme, reflecting other key themes (described in detail in the manuscript) that affected program implementation and evaluation, including collaboration, limited time and measurement integration. Conclusions. The EA process provided pilot data that suggest that other state, regional, and national funders should provide centralized assistance for data collection and evaluation from the outset of a mini-grant award program. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12889-019-7156-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.