Promising Practices
The Promising Practices database informs professionals and community members about documented approaches to improving community health and quality of life.
The ultimate goal is to support the systematic adoption, implementation, and evaluation of successful programs, practices, and policy changes. The database provides carefully reviewed, documented, and ranked practices that range from good ideas to evidence-based practices.
Learn more about the ranking methodology.
Filed under Good Idea, Community / Transportation, Teens
Goal: The curriculum is designed to build upon a young person's capacity for critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and other life skills essential for a systematic approach to addressing issues of community sustainability. More specifically, they chose transport as a lens through which a community's environment, culture, and value systems are examined.
Filed under Good Idea, Environmental Health / Energy & Sustainability, Urban
Goal: The goal of this legislation is to promote the design of more efficient buildings; thereby, reducing green house gas emissions, reducing energy costs, decreasing the use of potable water, and reducing the amount of stormwater runoff.
Filed under Good Idea, Environmental Health / Air
Goal: The goal of the Green Engineering Program is to incorporate risk related concepts into chemical processes and products designed by academia and industry.
Green Power Partnership - Bellingham's global warming pollution reduction through use of green power (Bellingham)
Filed under Effective Practice, Environmental Health / Air
Goal: The goal is for cities or companies to reduce their carbon footprint. For example, research shows that buying 100 percent green power is the most significant step the City of Bellingham can take to protect the climate; it would eliminating more than 65 percent of the global warming pollution caused by municipal operations.
Filed under Good Idea, Environmental Health / Energy & Sustainability, Children, Teens, Adults, Older Adults, Families, Urban
Goal: Green the Tenderloin provides urban gardening classes, fresh produce, and nutrition education to members of the community.
Filed under Effective Practice, Environmental Health / Built Environment
Goal: The goal of GreenScapes is to encourage companies and organizations to make more environmentally conscious landscaping decisions and to reduce, reuse, recycle and rebuy.
Filed under Good Idea, Health / Alternative Medicine, Rural
Goal: The goal of GUAMAP is to train rural community health workers to provide remote settlements in northern Guatemala with access to sustainable, low-cost, low-technology, effective health care through the use of acupuncture.
Filed under Good Idea, Health / Heart Disease & Stroke, Adults, Racial/Ethnic Minorities, Urban
Goal: The Hair, Heart & Health program embraces the notion that health education at the community level is an effective intervention strategy for preventable diseases like CHD, stroke and kidney disease.
Filed under Good Idea, Community / Civic Engagement
Goal: The program's mission is to bring community members together to provide food for the hungry by promoting sustainable use of excess resources.
Filed under Evidence-Based Practice, Health / Maternal, Fetal & Infant Health, Children, Families
Goal: The goal of Early Head Start (EHS) is to promote healthy prenatal outcomes for pregnant women, enhance the development of very young children, and promote healthy family functioning. The goal of Head Start is to increase school readiness of young children in low-income families.
Impact: Studies have demonstrated positive effects of the program for both 3- and 4-year-old children on pre-reading, pre-writing, vocabulary, and parent reports of children’s literacy skills. For 3-year-olds, a greater number of parents reported improved access to health care and better health status.