mNEAT is a valuable tool to assess your local nutrition environment landscape, but change doesn’t happen without taking further steps.
Now that you’ve built your mNEAT team and conducted a mNEAT assessment, it’s time to prep and implement your action plan. Use the following steps to move from assessment to action:
- Review the mNEAT results with your team.
- Celebrate your successes.
- Identify opportunities for improvement.
- Share the results with local food service venue management.
- Download venue-specific results from the mNEAT app.
- Assess the best way to share results with each venue. There are different ways to share and provide results, so consider Service-specific guidance, processes established by your installation, or venue preference.
- Determine if a lower-scoring venue is interested or able to make improvements locally.
- Target a focus area.
- Use the mNEAT assessment results, team, installation, or Service priorities, or high areas of impact to choose an action plan.
- Consider multiple factors, including who’ll be involved, your team’s planning process, and how you’ll get buy-in for your action plan.
- Map out your team’s plans.
- Collaborate with stakeholders.
- Develop short-, mid-, and long-range goals that are feasible.
- Assign team members to specific tasks.
- Set a meeting schedule.
- Identify milestones to track progress. You can refer to mNeat Facilitator's Guide Appendix D: Action Planning Sheets for guidance.
- Implement your strategic plan.
- Make changes in small, incremental steps.
- Assess your progress, identify challenges, and brainstorm solutions.
- Communicate your plan and progress.
- Determine how often you’ll update key leadership on your team’s progress (might be multiple teams or groups).
- Share your progress with nutrition, health promotion, or wellness departments, or other military nutrition environment advocates and supporters.
- Review branch policy.
- Your Service might request that you submit your action plan to headquarters leadership.
Progress isn’t always a straight line, and you might find your team returning to certain steps to reassess or regroup. Every team’s process is different—leadership support, adequate resources (time, money, personnel), and experience all play a role. Your local team, installation, or branch might have specific guidance along the way, so refer to it as needed. Above all, congratulate your team and yourself for your hard work to enhance the food environment where Service Members and their families live, work, and play.