The Assessment for Advancing Community Transformation Tool
The Assessment for Advancing Community Transformation Tool
Do you have a big vision for your community – one where all are healthy and thriving?
Are all of your collaborative partners on the same page for how to get there?
The Assessment for Advancing Community Transformation (AACT) tool was designed to help individuals and teams understand how far along the group is in its journey toward health transformation and what areas can be strengthened to help go further.
Click here to get your community or collaborative started with AACT.
Click here to take AACT as an individual. Your scores will not be combined with results with others in your community or collaborative.
About AACT
Unlike other assessments, AACT is community-driven and -directed and no outside support is needed to use the tool or interpret results.
The AACT consists of
- 6 Key Themes: Topics include collaboration, communication, advance equity, plan for action, measure to improve, and sustainability
- 22 Subthemes: Drilldown questions on main topic areas
- 4 Stages: A continuum to describe current status of efforts from ‘not yet started’ to ‘sustaining’ for each of the 22 questions
- 1 Community Score: Community members independently score then meet in deliberate conversation to agree on one score for each of the 22 items and an overall score, establish a baseline, and prioritize action steps
The validated AACT tool brings people together to get a deeper understanding and agreement on where the group is in its work together. It is not about getting a high score—there may be some places where a group is further along and other areas where efforts are just beginning.
The AACT is not designed to compare or rank communities. It is intended to help communities determine where attention can be focused to accelerate community transformation.
For questions about the AACT tool, please contact [email protected].
The Assessment for Advancing Community Transformation (AACT) was collaboratively developed by 100 Million Healthier Lives/Institute for Healthcare Improvement, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, and the Georgia Health Policy Center, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The developers are solely responsible for the content of the AACT, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
The AACT tool is intended for everybody participating in a community effort. It includes and elevates all community voices.
The AACT tool can be used by multisector collaboratives, formal boards, informal work groups, people within a single organization, etc. Each group interested in using the AACT tool defines their own “community.” A group can include a cross-sector collaborative working on health improvement, a geographic place (neighborhood, town, city, county), or a group of people who share other things in common.
The AACT platform does not collect any user information. Individual reports are available for download only by the user at the time the assessment is completed.
For more information on the AACT tool, including about privacy, please see the AACT FAQ.
The AACT tool provides each participant with an individual report of their responses. For the group of participants, a Combined Scores Report is generated, with variation for each indicator noted.
The process includes:
- Naming a community coordinator and a group dialogue facilitator.
- Identifying who will complete the assessment.
- Individually completing the assessment.
- Convening the group to review combined results.
- Engaging the group in dialogue about the results, paying close attention to large differences across individual responses.
- Reaching agreement on final scores for each of the 22 items and an overall score.
- Identify areas for action.
- Make a plan.
Much of the value of AACT comes from the group discussion with those who completed it. Understanding the various perspectives will provide important insights into your community’s work.
For more detailed instructions, please see the AACT Process Guide.
The AACT developers — 100 Million Healthier Lives/Institute for Public Health, County Health Rankings & Roadmaps, and the Georgia Health Policy Center — recognized there was a gap in information and tools to understand how groups are working together.
Few assessment tools were available for community-led initiatives to use without outside support, particularly in support of collaboratives interested in building healthy, equitable communities.
Unlike other assessments, the AACT is a validated tool that is collaborative-driven, collaborative-directed, and accessible to all for free. It was developed based on learnings from both the literature and decades of real-world, community experience.
For questions about the AACT tool, please contact [email protected].
