Instructions for Completing Your Community Action Plan

Purpose of the Forms—Three documents are discussed here.

  • Instructions.doc
  • Community Action Plan.doc
  • Examples.doc

The Community Action Plan form was developed for local health departments and other local community agencies to describe plans for health activities supported by programs in the NC Division of Public Health. Use the Community Action Plan form to submit your yearly Action Plan.

When and Where to Submit the Action Plan Documents

The Community Action Plan is due December 2 of the year your county was assigned to complete an assessment. All forms can be sent as an email attachment to the Office of Healthy Carolinians/Health Education. The documents may also be mailed on disk or as a printed copy to the Office of Healthy Carolinians/Health Education, Division of Public Health, 1915 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699–1915 or courier # 56–20–00.

General Guidance

The following pages provide detailed instructions for completing the Community Action Plan (also available on your CD-ROM). Example plans that illustrate the variety of objectives, settings, and interventions that might be used to address risk factors are included here and in Examples.doc. Health Departments and Healthy Carolinians Partnerships are encouraged to focus interventions toward achieving selected objectives that will have a significant impact on the identified needs of their community. The number of objectives and activities planned will depend on your funding as well as other resources available for activities in your community.

Begin by reviewing these instructions and the examples document. Also, assess progress on your current Action Plans. Your Regional Health Education Consultant is available for technical assistance.

Summary of Major Steps for Completing Your Community Action Plans:

Review these instructions completely and print a copy to guide you as you open the other documents. Review Examples.doc.

COPY the Community Action Plan.doc and the Additional Objectives.doc to your hard drive or disk. The following pages explain how to complete each document. If you have problems opening or copying the documents, please contact the Office of Healthy Carolinians/ Health Education. If you are without computer access, you can submit handwritten or typed copies of the documents.

GO to for the Governor’s Healthy Carolinians 2010 NC Health Objectives, review the focus areas, and choose one or more objectives to address.

DEVELOP one or more local community objectives that addresses the 2010 NC Health Objective you selected. Describe the intervention steps, target population, setting, and community partners and their roles and responsibilities necessary to accomplish the objective. Repeat this process using Additional Objectives.doc for each additional local objective to be addressed. Directions for inserting the additional objectives into your original document are on the following page.

Submit your plan to the Office of Healthy Carolinians/Health Education as described above.

Detailed Instructions for Using Microsoft Word
to Prepare the Community Health Action Plan Forms

  1. Copy both of the following files to a folder where you will be working.
  • Community Action Plan.doc (this form is used to begin your plan, including the initial 2010 NC Health Objective, your first Local Community Objective, and the steps or strategies for accomplishing the Local Community Objective).
  • Additional Objectives.doc (this document is used for each additional set of objectives that you choose to include in your Action Plan).
  1. Open the Community Action Plan.doc in Microsoft Word 97/2000.
  2. Save the document you opened in the previous step—You will receive a message that the file is read-only, and you will be forced to save the file by assigning it a different file name. Please assign a file name that includes your agency name followed by the phrase “Community Action Plan” (e.g., Pleasant Health Dept Program Action Plan).
  3. The Community Action Plan uses form fields in the shaded sections of the document so that your typing will be restricted to specific areas of the form. You enter information in the form fields by clicking and then typing. Enter the information requested in the header.
  4. Visit the web site and use copy/paste to choose and copy the appropriate Healthy Carolinians 2010 NC Health Objective into your plan. Otherwise, type in the text for the statewide objective.
  5. After entering the statewide objective, enter the number for your first Community Objective (#1), followed by the statement of your local community objective that addresses the statewide objective you have chosen.
  6. Click on the box at the left of your local community objective to indicate the type of change this objective proposes. If you select other, indicate the type of change the objective represents.
  7. Enter the steps for accomplishing the objective. Use the Tab key to move from column to column. If you reach the end of the table and need rows for additional steps, pressing the Tab key will continue to add rows at the end of the table. When finished entering the steps for your first Community Objective, perform the following series of steps to include another/new objective:
  • Press Ctrl-End (the Ctrl + End keys) to move to the end of the document.
  • From the main menu, choose Insert, then File.
  • Select the document named Additional Objectives.doc, and click OK to insert the text for a new objective into your Action Plan. If this is a different statewide objective, fill in the new 2010 NC Health Objective as explained in Step 5. If this is a new Community Objective for the same statewide objective used previously, you can copy the text from the previous statewide objective and paste it into the form before continuing with the new Community Objective.
  1. Repeat Step 8 for each additional objective in your plan. Be sure to save your work frequently! See the following sample document with guidance on completing the individual sections.

1Instructions.doc