Mobilizing community-led health promotion: Evidence-informed co-development of the Live Well PEI community mobilization platform and integrated granting program

INTERVENTION: Live Well PEI provides individuals and organizations in PEI with information and tools to support healthy behaviours. This paper describes the development of the Live Well PEI community-mobilization intervention, consisting of a website and integrated community granting program for health promotion initiatives. RESEARCH QUESTIONS: (1) What is an effective design of a web-based community-mobilization intervention for community-led health promotion and (2) what lessons can be learned and shared for community-engaged, evidence-informed public health intervention development? METHODS: Intervention development followed the Six Steps in Quality Intervention Development (6SQuID) process. Through literature reviews, jurisdictional scans, expert consultations, and community engagement, evidence for conditions that foster community mobilization was gathered and used to inform development of intervention components. The intervention was refined through iterative expert and community consultations. RESULTS: Four conditions that foster community-led health promotion were identified: accessibility of grant funding, availability of community data, resources to enhance capacity, and community collaboration. These conditions informed outputs of a Theory of Change. Intervention design that supports these conditions included website elements such as collections of evidence-informed health promotion interventions, stories of prior community-led projects, and community health status and needs information. The granting program integrates research and community feedback on project eligibility, grant administration and support for awardees. Findings from an evaluability assessment support pilot-testing implementation of the intervention. CONCLUSION: Development of the community-mobilization intervention provides a prime case example of evidence-informed, community-engaged public health intervention co-design. Learnings are applicable to community-focused health promotion initiatives across Canada.