Utilizing a community capitals framework to assess a public health intervention: Application of the CD+SI toolkit

This paper represents an effort to apply a mixed-method design and instrument, the Community Diagnostics and Social Impact (CD+SI) Toolkit, to the evaluation of one rural community within a federally-funded public health project, Healthier Together Lambert (HTL). The CD+SI is an operationalization of the Community Capitals Framework which helps practitioners capture stocks of various capitals within a community throughout the development of a project. The current study examined the capitals present in the community and how the public health project impacted extant capitals within the community. The CD+SI Toolkit allowed researchers to determine the extent to which the HTL project impacted extant community capitals. Participants rated social capital the highest, followed by political, built-financial, natural, cultural, and human capitals. Conceptual and methodological implications for practice are discussed, specifically the inclusion of mixed methods to capture the uniqueness and context of rural spaces for community development practice.