TGHC will cover expenses for members (including students/faculty/staff at member universities and individuals who are employees of member organizations); Please note that there is a $5.00 charge for non-members that can be paid at check-in.

Please RSVP by 5pm March 5th.

Location: 
Dogwood Conference Room, North Carolina Biotechnology Center
15 TW Alexander Drive, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3547

Call-in option: Toll free dial-in number: 1-800-848-2116, access code 27705#

THIS MONTH'S SPEAKER:  
 
Mary DeCoster is Food for the Hungry's Senior Specialist for social and behavioral change programs with the USAID funded TOPS program, working to strengthen implementer capacity to address social and behavior change programming. She has over 20 years experience in behavior change work in international and U.S. settings (primarily with immigrant families). She has managed communicable disease prevention and maternal / child health programs, backstopped child survival projects in Guatemala and Bolivia and worked as a bilingual lactation consultant. She has extensive experience working with volunteer peer educators, health promoters and lay health advisors. She has expertise leading trainings of trainers and developing curricula and training materials. Mary has two Master's degrees from UNC at Chapel Hill, in Library and Information Science and in Public Health from the Department of Health Behavior.
 
Tom Davis, MPH, is the Chief Program Officer for Feed the Children. Tom has 30 years of international field experience in planning, implementing, and evaluating MCHN and social and behavioral change activities in child survival, food security, HIV/AIDS, and primary health care projects in twenty-five countries. He has co-led the Food Security and Nutrition Network’s Social & Behavioral Change Task Force, and served as Chairman of the Board for the CORE Group (7 years) and as a member of CORE’s SBC Working Group. Tom developed the Barrier Analysis methodology for discovering determinants of behaviors (which is part of the Designing for Behavior Change training and featured in the textbook, Global Health 101), co-authored the Local Determinants of Malnutrition Study methodology, and has been a champion and pioneer of the Care Group model which has significantly reduced child deaths and malnutrition in many countries. He was also the 2012 recipient of the APHA Gordon Wyan Award for Excellence in Community-Oriented Public Health, Epidemiology and Practice. 
 
The Care Group approach as a behavior change strategy in child survival projects:
The Care Group approach is a behavior change strategy, which has consistently outperformed other approaches in reducing malnutrition and maternal and child deaths in child survival projects, and is now being adapted to – and tested in – other contexts. This approach stands on the shoulders of support, education and outreach approaches using lay health advisors, community health workers, peer educators, mother-to-mother support groups and other similar approaches, to achieve high quality interventions and nearly 100% coverage resulting in life-saving behavior change and sustainably changing community norms and practices. 
 
This approach relies on community-based volunteer peer educators who regularly meet together with NGO project staff for training and supervision. Each volunteer is responsible for regularly visiting about 12 of her neighbors, sharing what she has learned and promoting behavior change at the household level. Care Groups create a multiplying effect to equitably reach every beneficiary household with behavior change activities and messaging. They also provide the structure for a community health information system that reports on new pregnancies, births and deaths detected during home visits. The model was created by World Relief in 1995 and pioneered and championed by Food for the Hungry and World Relief since then.
 
Since 1995, World Relief, Food for the Hungry, Feed the Children, and at least 24 other nongovernmental organizations (see Implementers  page) in 21 countries have adopted the Care Group model, largely with the support of the US Agency for International Development. The CORE Group has helped document and disseminate the model, and there has been increasing attention to the model and its effectiveness in lowering child deaths (e.g., seeUNICEF’s 2008 State of the World’s Children Report). Davis et al have published a peer-reviewed paperin 2013on the effectiveness of Care Groups in lowering malnutrition in Mozambique. For more on Care Groups see caregroupinfo.org