Developing Group Model-Building Workshops for Children’s Healthy Living Food Systems

This article reports on the development of group model-building workshops for understanding children's nutrition and health as a complex adaptive system. A community-based system dynamics approach was used to conduct workshops in 5 United States-Affiliated Pacific jurisdictions as part of the Children's Healthy Living Food Systems project from October 2022 to March 2023. Workshops were cofacilitated by local teams using a facilitation guide with a series of structured small-group exercises or "scripts" and evaluated using a pre-post participant survey. Products generated through these workshops included causal maps of the food systems driving child nutrition and health and prioritized action ideas that can be used to inform program design, planning, and implementation of local initiatives. Workshop evaluation highlights the robustness of workshops across jurisdictions, cultural contexts, and varied experiences of facilitation teams. Implications for the future development of group model-building facilitation guides and child nutrition are discussed.