Assess your community capacity and needed resources
Group education can be offered in a variety of ways that will influence the resources you will need to prepare for the sessions. If your group education focuses on increasing knowledge and awareness, you will probably want to consider resources such as meeting space, informational materials, guest speakers, and other resources related to creative activities. You may also need to ensure that your materials are linguistically and culturally appropriate for the priority populations. If your group education focuses on skill-building and increasing self-confidence, you may need to consider resources such props or equipment to facilitate role playing exercises, and other things such as competitive incentives. As you develop your budget, be sure to incorporate the costs for these types of resources. For more information on creating your budget, see Budget Preparation in Capacity.
Training for instructors and facilitators of group education interventions may require the development of certain skill sets. For example, it may be necessary to have skills at motivating participants, listening or responding to special needs (e.g., stress management, learning disabilities), understanding group dynamics, resolving conflict, establishing a leadership role, and keeping participants actively involved. Likewise, evaluation of group education interventions can be complex and may require assistance from researchers and other partners who have experience with study design, measurement development, data collection, data analysis or translation of research findings into practical implications for your community.
It may be useful to develop lists of community resources available for various sub-groups of the population. In developing these lists, it is important to provide information on transportation (e.g., is there public transit available to get people to the sessions?) and payment options (e.g., sliding scale fees, free classes?). In instances where there are few accessible options, it may be useful to combine these strategies with other strategies as part of community, faith-based, or worksite intervention approaches.
Evidence from previous work on group education interventions has suggested that these sessions can be relatively inexpensive interventions to implement. Group education interventions have performed well with a variety of different financial, personnel, space, equipment, and materials considerations in order.
Previous work in group education has found:
- Some of the costs for group education interventions are for personnel time, including :
- Staff time to design, develop, implement and evaluate the curriculum.
- Training staff, health educators, nurse or peer leaders to lead group meetings or classroom education.
- Space is an important consideration for group education interventions. This type of intervention can be conducted in community centers, schools, physicians’ offices, hospitals and a variety of other settings. While many of these settings are free of charge or have small fees associated with their use, your intervention may require renting a space that is convenient for your population to get to for your activities.
- Materials and equipment may be required to conduct group education interventions. Many of these interventions utilize teacher’s manuals, student workbooks, videotapes, brochures and newsletters. Some of these materials are available for purchase or can be obtained free of charge.
- Materials used in group education may need to be developed or translated for people with different literacy levels or for those who speak different languages to be understood by all individuals in the group.
- Additional resources to consider include incentives as part of competitions and contests or as positive reinforcement for participating in group activities.
- Interventions that include an exercise component often require fitness equipment, trained exercise instructors and facilities with enough room to house the exercise activities.
- Recruiting participants may involve printing flyers or posting advertisements in the newspaper.
- Some participants may need transportation to the intervention activities and/or clinic testing.
- Bilingual/bicultural staff may be required to deliver intervention messages to different participants.
The Readiness and Preparation and Capacity sections provide information and resources to help you think about the resources you might need for your intervention.