GCDTR toolkit

Community Diabetes Action Toolkit

A practical planning guide for community organizations, employers, clinics, and research teams working together on diabetes prevention, management support, and healthier local environments.

Why This Matters

Diabetes and prediabetes affect millions of people in the United States and create health, productivity, affordability, and quality-of-life burdens for families, workplaces, and communities. Community action can support prevention, diabetes self-management education, healthier environments, and more timely connections to care.

Action Areas

Prevention and early identification

  • Offer type 2 diabetes risk screening at community events.
  • Connect high-risk adults to evidence-based lifestyle change programs.
  • Build referral relationships with local clinics and diabetes education programs.

Diabetes management support

  • Promote diabetes self-management education and support services.
  • Address medication, insulin, transportation, food, and appointment barriers.
  • Include mental health and social support in planning conversations.

Healthy meetings and workplaces

  • Offer water, unsweetened beverages, and balanced food choices at meetings.
  • Build movement breaks into long meetings and trainings.
  • Make wellness resources easy to find in employee communications.

Communication and outreach

  • Share plain-language messages about risk, prevention, and care.
  • Use trusted community messengers and culturally relevant examples.
  • Repeat messages through newsletters, events, social media, and partner networks.

Planning Worksheet

  1. Define the audience: employees, patients, caregivers, students, community members, or partner organizations.
  2. Name the problem: prevention gap, affordability concern, referral gap, education need, food access issue, or workplace wellness opportunity.
  3. Select the intervention: screening, referral, meeting policy, education series, benefits navigation, peer support, or communication campaign.
  4. Choose measures: reach, referral completion, participation, satisfaction, A1C or risk status when appropriate, and implementation barriers.
  5. Plan sustainability: owner, budget, communication cadence, referral maintenance, and feedback loop.
Research teams should document community input, adaptation decisions, implementation context, and equity considerations. These notes can strengthen grants, protocols, manuscripts, and dissemination products.