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Children’s Nebraska 

In 2023-2024, Children's Nebraska funded ten Nebraska community-based organizations to enhance financial stability, food security, healthy housing, and pediatric mental wellness. The Center for Nutrition & Health Impact has two roles:
1. provided expertise and technical assistance for grantees to effectively evaluate their grant-funded program and disseminate the findings.
2. evaluated grantees' confidence about implementation, evaluation, communication, and sustainability-related competencies from the experience.

Grantees were provided a total of four learning collaboratives and two individualized meetings throughout the funding period.

PREVIOUS COLLABORATIONS

CNHI has collaborated with Children's Nebraska since 2013 to support their Community Impact Grant program. This has included developing the request for proposals and scoring criteria, evaluating the grant program, and providing technical assistance through learning collaboratives and individual meetings.

Past Grantee

From 2013 to 2015, the Center for Nutrition & Health Impact (CNHI) received funding from the Children’s Hospital & Medical Center PCO grants program. CNHI worked in collaboration with the Omaha Nutrition Education Collaborative to produce five, brief instructional videos on how early care providers and parents can educate children, up to age five, about nutrition during meals through conversation, by asking questions, making statements, setting rules and praising good behavior.

Program Evaluation

In 2016, CNHI was selected by Children’s Hospital & Medical Center to conduct an evaluation of the overall impact of the PCO grants program. The evaluation included interviewing grantees to discuss reach of the programs, grantee organization readiness to complete projects, and assess challenges and successes for the organizations trying to address childhood obesity in our community. Information was compiled to determine key findings and recommendations for evaluation strategies to increase capacity among community organizations, determine overall impact of the grants program and how to strengthen the grants program.

Development of RFPs, Scoring Criteria and Review Process

In 2017, CNHI partnered with the newly developed Children’s Center for the Child & Community to rebuild the request for proposals (RFP) and scoring metrics for the PCO grants program, as well as aid in refining the areas of focus. In addition, CNHI helped lead a workshop to introduce the new RFP process to potential grantees, explaining new aspects of the grant.  

Learning Collaborative and Technical Assistance

In collaboration with Children’s Center for the Child & Community, CNHI launched a Learning Collaborative with sessions for grantees that focus on building capacity in areas such as evaluation, implementation and sustainability. In addition, CNHI provides evaluation technical assistance for the PCO grantees on an as needed basis.