How Food & Fitness Community Partnerships Successfully Engaged Youth.

Authentic youth engagement was a central component of the Food & Fitness (F&F) Initiative, a 9-year community-based intervention, whose goal was to ensure that all children have equitable access to healthy food and built environments that promote safe physical activity. The youth engagement component focused on strategies and structures that would support a model framework for youth involved in F&F community partnerships. These strategies empowered youth by providing the leadership and technical skills needed in collaborative efforts to sustain change in communities with inequities, where structural racism and inequities result in poor health outcomes for children. This article describes the models that the diverse urban and rural communities across the United States employed to successfully engage youth in the vision and work of F&F and discusses overall lessons learned, challenges, and best practices/recommendations for effectively engaging youth in community-determined change.

Creating healthier afterschool environments in the Healthy Eating Active Communities program.

Afterschool programs in California have the potential to play a major role in obesity prevention given that they serve close to a million low-income children. A five-year initiative called the Healthy Eating Active Communities (HEAC) was funded in 2005 by the California Endowment to demonstrate that disparities related to childhood obesity and diabetes could be reduced in communities that offered families accessible and affordable opportunities for healthy eating and physical activity. The afterschool program setting constituted one of five key settings targeted in the initiative. This chapter describes the HEAC afterschool program initiative, reviews findings from the HEAC afterschool program nutrition and physical activity evaluation, and shares strategies that were used to implement the five-year training and technical assistance intervention.

Adapting a 1% or less milk campaign for a Hispanic/Latino population: the Adelante Con Leche Semi-descremada 1% experience.

PURPOSE: Describe and evaluate a media campaign to encourage 1% or nonfat milk consumption. DESIGN: Uncontrolled pre/post test. SETTING: One largely rural (Santa Paula) and one urban (East Los Angeles) California community. SUBJECTS: Community residents and milk vendors in primarily low-income Latino/Hispanic communities. INTERVENTION: The "1% or Less" milk campaign, which promotes substitution of 2% fat or whole milk with 1% or less fat milk was adapted and implemented. MEASURES: Comparison of post-campaign milk sales with pre-campaign sales. ANALYSIS: Chi-square tests of independence used to compare precampaign and postcampaign sales. RESULTS: There were decreases in the proportion of whole milk sold and increases in the proportion of reduced-fat, low-fat, and nonfat milk sold in the weeks following each campaign (Santa Paula: p = .0165; East Los Angeles: p < .0001). However, follow-up data from East Los Angeles suggest that these changes were not sustained. The proportions of the different units of milk sold also changed in the weeks following each campaign (p < .0001). Sales of whole milk gallon units decreased from 36.3% to 28.4% in Santa Paula, and from 43.5% to 10.2% in East Los Angeles. CONCLUSION: Highly focused campaigns to promote substitution of high-fat milk with low-fat or nonfat milk can show dramatic initial changes in sales patterns. However, whether such campaigns can have a sustained impact in largely Latino/Hispanic communities is not evident.