About Us

The HFFI is a NIOSH-funded program, providing community outreach programs to agriculturally-based families.

The HFFI is a collaborative intervention project designed to bring together farm families, community leaders, community organizations and the university (through the department of nursing), to develop, implement, and evaluate programs designed to increase awareness of agricultural production hazards, recognize the need to reduce risks, and promote occupational health behaviors.  A dual purpose is to enhance community capacity-building to change unsafe/hazardous farm practices by fostering empowerment among farm women and children.  In addition, the project serves to enhance awareness of the farm culture, agricultural production risks, and community health implementation for nursing students while increasing research and publication skills for university faculty.

The HFFI has become more comprehensive and complex over time, increasing the number of community members and organizations involved in various aspects of the project.  The increased complexity of the project signals the need to capture the rich data available throughout the project implementation, not just evaluating the impact and outcome of individual level outcome objectives.  To reflect organizational involvement, evaluation will focus on the process of building partnerships and bridging services to enhance resources and minimize duplication of effort.  Several coalitions have been formed throughout the history of the Healthy Farm Families Initiative.  One obvious coalition has been the coming together of concerned women in Washington Parish to form the Healthy Farm Families Partnership.  However, other groups have functioned as coalitions as well.  Most recently a group of farm men and women, extension agents, university faculty members, and Future Farmers of America advisors from 4 parishes formed a planning committee to plan, coordinate and implement the first Progressive Farmer Safety Day Camp in this region.  These types of coalitions serve as a great opportunity to comprehensively evaluate organizational and interorganizational change.