Engaging stakeholder communities as body image intervention partners: The Body Project as a case example

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Public Health
• Intervention Science

Background:

• Global mental health requires scalable psychological interventions.
• Prevention programs offer a viable strategy for broad reach.
• Task-shifting and community partnerships are crucial for dissemination.

Purpose of the Study:

• To discuss the dissemination and implementation of the Body Project, an evidence-based body image prevention program.
• To identify key elements facilitating partnership development, dissemination, and implementation.
• To generalize lessons learned to other prevention programs.

Main Methods:

• Community-based participatory research methods.
• A blended train-the-trainer and task-shifting approach.
• Implementation across 6 diverse national and international stakeholder partnerships.

Main Results:

• Consistent themes emerged across partnerships: shared decision-making, engaging community leaders, emphasizing partner strengths, and working within community structures.
• Optimizing financial resources, valuing cost-effectiveness and sustainability, program marketing, and supporting flexibility were also key.
• Successful implementation involved adapting strategies for community evolution and research.

Conclusions:

• The Body Project's implementation highlights the importance of collaborative approaches for evidence-based intervention dissemination.
• Key strategies include shared decision-making, leveraging community strengths, and flexible adaptation.
• Lessons learned can inform the scale-up of other body image and eating disorder prevention programs.