Families Moving Together: Designing and Feasibility Testing a Community Physical Activity Intervention for Public Housing Residents (RPA Pilot / Seed Project)

Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged children are less likely than their White peers to meet Kindergarten readiness to learn standards. These racial and socioeconomic disparities may increase the long-term risk of school drop-out, substance abuse, physical inactivity, and obesity. Physical activity (PA) may improve readiness to learn because participation promotes healthy physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development. Engaging in PA with a primary caregiver, PA co-participation, is a novel intervention strategy for promoting child PA and Kindergarten readiness skills. The overall goal of this proposal is to use community-based approaches to design and test the feasibility and acceptability of Families Moving Together, a family PA co-participation intervention for female caregivers and their 3- to 5-year-old children receiving rental assistance. This study will be conducted among public housing residents in the East End neighborhood in Lexington, KY. In Aim 1, we will engage community stakeholders (e.g., housing authority staff, early education and recreation professionals, and faith leaders) in the development of strategies to promote PA by creating a Health Equity Action Team focused on PA promotion (PA-HEAT). PA-HEAT members (community stakeholders and the research team) will develop 3-5 multi-level strategies to increase PA co-participation and Kindergarten readiness using the PRACTIS (PRACTical planning for Implementation and Scale-up) guide during action planning sessions. In Aim 2, we will test the feasibility and acceptability of the cocreated strategies across a 6-month period among program attendees and the initial efficacy for increasing PA co-participation, child PA, and readiness to learn among an evaluation cohort. We expect to have preliminary data to support a competitive extramural funding proposal to test the efficacy of the Families Moving Together intervention. Our research uses community-based participatory strategies to promote racial equity in academic and health outcomes among preschool-aged children from families who are living in public (or subsidized) housing.