Category Archives: 5-4-3-2-1 Go!

Looking Back and Looking Forward: Our Tenth Year and Beyond

Posted on October 15, 2012

Adam Becker

by Adam Becker, PhD, MPH, Executive Director

Welcome to the fourth and final quarter of our 10^th anniversary year! I hope you have found this year to be an exciting review of our decade of the accomplishments we have achieved together and an interesting examination of the things that make CLOCC tick. This quarter, we are looking toward the future of childhood obesity prevention in Chicago and beyond.

In CLOCC’s early days, under the energetic leadership of Matt Longjohn and the thoughtful guidance of our founder, Katherine Kaufer Christoffel, the staff’s main focus was building the consortium from dozens to hundreds, organization by organization. We developed and implemented strategic approaches to demonstrating that there was indeed an obesity epidemic in Chicago and that collaboration among diverse partners was essential to combat it. In some ways, our work now is easier – very few would argue that there isn’t an obesity epidemic! The combination of our local surveillance and organizing work and an emerging national understanding of the scale of the epidemic has helped Chicago recognize that we have a serious health problem on our hands. However, the work is also more complicated as we learn more about obesity and its many causes and risk factors. It has become increasingly apparent that there is no single solution.

Early on, a lot of our collective efforts were focused on programming – short-term, specific programs and interventions developed to start or keep individual children on a path to a healthy lifestyle. Our attention to individually-focused approaches and the recognition that children and families needed sound information make good decisions when it came to nutrition and physical activity led us to develop the 5-4-3-2-1 Go!® healthy lifestyle message. The message was intended to be a roadmap for children and families to follow to ensure healthy and active lives. As the years unfolded and the national and local research and experience base matured, we began to recognize the importance of altering the environments in which children and families find themselves – making health easier where kids and families live, work, learn, and play. Known as policy, systems, and environmental change (PSE) strategies, these approaches support communities with the goal of making healthy options the default options. 5-4-3-2-1 Go! public education remains a foundation of what we do as a consortium, but it is now squarely supported by environmental change solutions that help families to achieve these recommendations more easily. Our Healthy Places initiative is firmly rooted in the promotion of PSE strategies.

As the decade progressed, new research also emerged indicating that our initial focus on the three to five year old caused us to miss important opportunities to start prevention early in life. An important study by Elsie Taveras showed that weight gain in the first six months of life was more predictive of weight at age 3 than was weight at birth. Staff and partners began to look at emerging approaches across the country to reach children from “day 1” and even reach their parents during or just before pregnancy. Breastfeeding emerged as an important strategy that we needed to support, and a focus on childcare institutions as a key context for obesity prevention solidified. We created the Early Childhood Working Group to guide the consortium in these new enterprises.

More and more science continues to emerge about the role that access to unhealthy foods and beverages plays in the obesity epidemic – that improving access to healthy options was necessary but not sufficient if we were really going to succeed at reducing childhood obesity rates in Chicago. Following the lead of national organizations, we have begun to look at effective approaches to reducing the “at-your fingertip” access to foods and beverages high in calories from fat and sugar but low in nutritional value and to partnering with childcare, schools, workplaces, and city government to strike a better balance between access to healthier and less healthy foods and beverages. In a similar vein, the field of obesity prevention practitioners has begun to look to non-traditional partners for increasing access to safe opportunities for physical activity. This involves partnering with land use planners, transportation professionals, and the business sector to increase access to parks, playgrounds, safe streets, and sidewalks where people, and especially children, can walk, run, ride, and engage in other forms of activity.

Throughout this tenth anniversary year, we have been taking stock, asking questions, and doing some serious strategic thinking. We have had three retreats involving staff, leadership, and national expert advisors to explore where the data and evidence suggest we must go in the coming decade. We have gathered feedback from the consortium along the way through various means to ensure that these emerging plans are grounded in the experience and lessons learned of the many partners that make CLOCC what it is – a thriving, ever-growing national model for comprehensive, community-based childhood obesity prevention. All of this information has been sifted and sorted, and it is the basis for our planning for the next decade. New approaches to public education, refined strategies for policy and environmental change, innovative partnerships beyond the traditional obesity prevention advocates and practitioners, a strengthening focus on early childhood approaches, and effective methods for reducing access to and promotion of unhealthy foods and beverages will all be part of this next decade of work. And, as ever, we will remain open to new ideas, emerging research and evidence, and the increasing collection of local and national best practices so the next decade is grounded in the many successes and lessons of our past, but also full of yet uncharted and endless possibility. We are putting the final touches on a “blueprint for accelerating progress in childhood obesity prevention in Chicago,” and we are very excited to present it at the December 6 Quarterly Meeting. We look forward to unveiling our plans with you, the culmination of this year of reflection and information gathering. And we are inspired by the emerging vision of what we can do together in 2013 and beyond to achieve them!

Catching Up With the Go Team

Posted on June 25, 2012

From 2006 – 2008, CLOCC ran a pilot program where we trained high school students from across the city to become members of the “Go Team,” a group charged with teaching the 5-4-3-2-1 Go!® message to young children across the city by leading them in games and activities. Over 25 high school students served as Go Team members over the two years, and they presented the message to over 5,000 children throughout Chicago. Recently, as part of our 10^th anniversary celebration, we caught up with four of our alumni to find out what they are up to and to hear about their memories of the Go Team experience.

Ivan Zavala

Ivan Zavala, a graduate of Kelly High School, was the only Go Team member to participate in the project from beginning to end. He is now 20 years old and a second-year student at the Pacific College of Oriental Medicine in Chicago working toward becoming a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Ivan credits his experience in Go Team with giving him a foundation in health and starting him on a path that has led him to his interest in alternative medicine. He enjoyed his time with Go Team and its focus on teaching young children. “I like the commitment of Go Team to educate kids,” he stated. “We have an epidemic of childhood obesity and modern disease. I like that we went to the kids because kids are the foundation to the future. This nation is the tree and the kids are the root, and if you water the root, the tree will be prosperous.” Ivan is committed to healthy choices in his own life, sharing, “I take a walk every day, and I always follow the five fruits and vegetables a day recommendation. I have developed a taste for them – my palate has changed!”

Click on the video below to hear Ivan share one of his favorite Go Team memories:

Jamal Nelson

Jamal Nelson, a graduate of Robeson High School, is now 20 years old and a sophomore at Knox College in Galesburg, IL, majoring in education and literature. He plans to become a teacher and to pursue his interests in writing and art. Jamal credits his Go Team experience with giving him more confidence, stating, “Go Team had a big effect on me. It was my first job – having that kind of responsibility. Being in front of people and having to lead – that was my first experience like that ever.” Go Team was also Jamal’s first experience being around young children. “It was fun seeing the kids’ face – they enjoyed everything we were doing. I miss that – the enjoyment. I found out that kids can laugh and have fun and play around with me, and I became freer about playing with them. They were all having fun and smiling. I never thought I would have the ability to be that personable with young kids. I really enjoyed that.”

Jamal’s favorite Go Team memory is of his very first event as a member of the team: “One of the best memories I have was actually the first day that I started. We were at this preschool in Little Village. I remember freaking out before I even started. I was sitting there and trying to get myself ready to do this. I’m like, ‘I know what I’m going to say, I know what I’m going to say,’ and then, as soon as all the kids came out, there were so many of them. I stood there and thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m not ready to do this.’ I looked at my teammates, and they are looked at me like, ‘Calm down. You’re all right.’ And I thought, ‘You could tell me that but I’m not going to be able to do that.’ And then they pretty much throw me out there and say, ‘Do what we just did. You know what to do.’ And I remember when they first let me talk, and I just started doing it. I don’t know how, I don’t know what in my body let me do it, but as soon as they gave me the floor, I was able to conduct the event just like they did it. As scared as I was, I was able to do it. And then they all said, ‘Good job, good job – you know what you’re doing.’ The reason why that is such a good memory of mine is because I just remember being in front of so many kids and my first-ever experience of talking in front of a big crowd and just accomplishing it. It was something I never thought I could do, and I did it – not just for the members on the team but also for myself. The first day – that’s what I’m always going to remember.”

Keanna Johnson

Keanna Johnson, a graduate of the Chicago Math and Science Academy, is now 21 years old and attending school studying elder-care nursing and home assistance. She is also the mother of a three-year-old daughter, who Keanna is raising to follow the 5-4-3-2-1 Go! recommendations. Keanna enjoyed her time in Go Team and particularly liked meeting other high schoolers who shared the same interests as she did. Some of the information she learned about barriers to healthy eating as a Go Team member has resonated with her now that she is a mom. “I realized that although this is a good message to send out, it can also be an expensive message depending on the neighborhood you live in. I try to keep my family healthy, but trying to keep the refrigerator filled with fruits, vegetables, and dairy products can put a dent in my pocket. I also remember learning in Go Team that, depending on the neighborhood you live in, the prices of the healthy food can vary, and I noticed that is true.” Keanna’s favorite Go Team memory is about the team spreading the word about 5-4-3-2-1 Go!: “The memory that stands out is the thought of a group of young people travelling all around Chicago together to promote healthy eating and physical activity to children. That just really stands out to me.”

Deonta Blandin

Deonta Blandin, a graduate of Al Raby High School, is now 21 years old and a student at Wright College in Chicago. He is also a courier with FedEx and the father of a two-year-old son. Like fellow parent Keanna, he is also following the 5-4-3-2-1 Go! recommendations at home, sharing, “I still use the fun tips and facts we learned about a healthy lifestyle in Go Team. We buy more fruits and vegetables at home and keep active as a family.” Deonta liked the flexibility of the message, noting, “I liked that the message wasn’t just for a specific person, but for everyone of all ages – kids, teens, adults, parents, and grandparents.” He found his time in Go Team “a life changing experience,” and felt that it would be great if the Go Team reach went even further than it did, stating, “We did a lot of events that I wish we were still doing. It was what the city needed, and I think it is what our country needs.” Deonta has several favorite Go Team memories: “I just remember the smiles and laughter on the kids’, teens’, and adults’ faces when we challenged them, how most people caught on quickly to what we were teaching. I remember being part of the team – brainstorming, being educated also, doing interviews, and making videos. We had a great pact, and we were a great Go Team!”

What Makes CLOCC Tick: 10 Years of Community Partnerships

Posted on April 12, 2012

Adam Becker

by Adam Becker, PhD, MPH, Executive Director

Partners and friends,

April marks the beginning of the second quarter of our 10th anniversary year! This quarter, we are focusing on two of the hallmarks of the consortium’s operations – our community work and partnerships as well as public education in community settings.

Community partners are really what make CLOCC a consortium. When we started ten years ago, community organizations and advocates were among the first groups to get involved with the consortium and help to spread the word about the growing obesity epidemic in Chicago. The partnerships that formed and the voices of community partners shaped CLOCC’s mission, priorities, and intervention strategies. At the beginning, we literally built CLOCC organization by organization until we honed community intervention strategies that allowed us to bring partners together more effectively. Once a critical mass of organizations engaged, we formed working groups with specific areas of focus and expertise.

Working Groups continue to be an important engine for the consortium. Although they emerge and dissipate as the needs and interests of the consortium change, and they take different approaches to process and structure, all of them serve three primary functions:

• Keeping the consortium connected to the particular sector they represent and ensuring that the information and resources the consortium has is made available to that sector.

• Ensuring that the consortium as a whole learns from the expertise of those sectors.

• Helping to develop effective strategies for obesity prevention within that sector – sometimes leading to specific funded strategies.

While CLOCC has been and will remain open to partners from communities across Chicago and beyond, leadership agreed early on that we needed to hone our understanding of, and strategies for, addressing the challenges and opportunities for obesity prevention at the neighborhood level. To that end, we partnered with organizations in a few diverse Chicago communities. In 2004, we identified six communities (our “Vanguard Communities”) in which to place neighborhood-based staff and pilot community interventions. We expanded to ten Vanguard Communities in 2006. These community-based staff and their partners helped the consortium as a whole to learn effective ways to reach children, families, and the organizations that serve them. We learned what schools needed and contributed, how parks figure into the community landscape, who was involved in healthy food access activities, and what community priorities were for research and advocacy. In Humboldt Park, our partnership with the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and the Sinai Urban Health Institute, combined with funding from the Otho S. A. Sprague Memorial Institute, resulted in the development of Community Organizing for Obesity Prevention (CO-OP), a key coalition-building strategy of our community-level work. CO-OP was expanded through iterations in Englewood and Pilsen. The CO-OP strategy mobilizes existing community leaders and organizations, supports their collaboration to develop intervention strategies, promotes healthy eating and physical activity at the community level, and links clinical practices to community programs. Specific strategies that are locally relevant emerge under the guidance of CO-OP coalition leaders and members help identify and connect to approaches from other neighborhoods. The CO-OP HP experience is described in-depth in a book edited by staff at SUHI and will soon appear in a new edition of a classic book on community organizing for public health. Although the formal CO-OP structures in the three neighborhoods have merged into other local initiatives, CO-OP remains an option for CLOCC’s engagement in new communities.

In 2011, after a year of review and discussion with CLOCC staff and leadership, we decided to expand from a community-by-community model to a regional approach. Because the field of obesity prevention has matured and we have identified an emerging set of strategies in use in Chicago and across the country that have the most promise for creating change, we are shifting our approach in order to support and engage with more communities across Chicago to ensure that they too have access to this promising set of approaches. Our Community Networkers, formerly assigned to one specific vanguard community, have transitioned into a new role: Community Program Coordinators. In this new role, CLOCC’s community-based staff will connect to more Chicago neighborhoods and bring specific strategies, along with training and support to increase the likelihood of success to partners who are committed to obesity prevention and health-related work. Beginning this quarter, Community Program Coordinators will begin working in city regions – North, West, Southwest, Northwest, and South. We are excited about the new relationships we are already beginning to establish as a consortium as we move to this new model and look forward to connecting to partners in new and innovative ways.

One of the biggest resources we are able to bring to our community partners is our public education message, 5-4-3-2-1 Go!®, and the tools for training and dissemination that come along with it. The message was developed by CLOCC in 2004, and to date thousands of community partners have been trained on it. Our vision is one of “surround sound messaging” in which children, families, and those who interact with them will see our message everywhere they go, reminding them of the five important elements of a healthy lifestyle – designed with young children in mind but healthy for everyone. To realize this vision, we blanketed Chicago with 5-4-3-2-1 Go! posters, billboards, and CTA advertising in the fall of 2009 as part of a citywide advertising campaign. Hundreds of CLOCC partners helped with distribution, participated in special events, and disseminated the message to their own constituencies. 5-4-3-2-1 Go! materials have been downloaded in 49 states and 18 countries around the world. The demand for 5-4-3-2-1 Go! became so great that we brought on a full-time Health Educator in 2009 to focus exclusively on message training and outreach.

The future of our community work and public education outreach looks bright. Our Healthy Places initiative has helped us to develop and hone a diverse set of environmental change strategies to improve access for all Chicagoans to healthy food and safe opportunities where they live, work, learn, and play – especially in those communities where access is insufficient and obesity-related health disparities occur. Many of these strategies are based on those we piloted in CLOCC’s early work in the vanguard communities. We expect to provide training and technical support to community organizations across the city to support implementation of these new strategies. We will continue to offer free trainings several times a year so interested organizations can learn about 5-4-3-2-1 Go! and explore ways to integrate it into their programming. We are also developing a pilot project to work with organizations to integrate 5-4-3-2-1 Go! more deeply at their organizations in addition to using it in their programs; ensuring that organizational practices, policies, and environments are aligned with the message. As interest in the message grows locally and across the region and nation, we will explore new opportunities to support its use.

CLOCC staff and leadership are grateful to all of the community partners who help keep our consortium strong and vibrant. We are humbled by all that they have taught us. We look forward to new and exciting ways to build on and expand this critical element of our collective work. As a special way to celebrate our community partners during our 10th anniversary, we have launched the We are CLOCC contest with a $2,500 prize – go here for more information.

Next quarter, we will continue along the theme of partnerships and take a deeper look at some of our very unique partnerships beyond those in geographic communities. My July blog post will explore the consortium’s work with corporations, government, schools, and the clinical sector. Talk to you again soon!

Bringing a Healthy Message (and Fake Food) to Families at the Chicago Children’s Museum

Posted on March 23, 2011

Adam Paberzs

by Adam Paberzs, Health Education Intern

The Chicago Children’s Museum played host to a fun and family-oriented health and wellness fair on January 27, 2011 at Navy Pier. Kids and parents came from all over the city to learn about healthy habits, receive free screenings, and enjoy physical activities. I was there to represent CLOCC at the event.

The fair was an exciting and energetic event, and amidst the hustle and bustle, children and families found their way to my table to learn about 5-4-3-2-1 Go!™ – CLOCC’s public education campaign to promote healthy lifestyles for children. The CLOCC table offered an interactive visual representation of the 5-4-3-2-1 Go! message using tools like food models that illustrated each of the healthy lifestyle recommendations. Kids and parents alike couldn’t resist touching the food models and comparing the different examples of servings of fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy. The kids especially loved (and even tried to taste) the orange, cheese, and strawberry models. The milk models won over even the museum staff, who expressed genuine shock at the amount of fat found in whole milk compared to skim.

My interaction with parents led to lots of interesting questions such as, “Does rice milk and regular milk have the same amount of nutrients?”, “How much cheese is too much?”, and “Do chores count as physical activity?” One father shared his concern about the nutritional quality of the lunches being served at his son’s day-care center. We discussed some of the challenges he encountered working with the day-care staff, and ideas for communicating the importance of moving toward healthier food options. It served as a reminder of the important role schools and childcare facilities play in getting children the nutrients they need to be healthy.

The Chicago Children’s Museum continues to partner with communities and organizations like CLOCC throughout the city to promote healthy, active lifestyles for children and their families. Every Thursday, CCM hosts a Free Family Night that allows kids and families to experience a range of cultural, educational, and health and wellness activities. During Free Family Night, the museum uses different exhibits to encourage fun physical movement, health and wellness, and a spirit of exploration.

To learn more about the Chicago Children’s Museum, visit the museum’s website. For more information and a list of available 5-4-3-2-1 Go! resources, check out CLOCC’s
5-4-3-2-1 Go! home page.

Project SOAR Takes 5-4-3-2-1 Go! Promotion to New Heights

Posted on November 4, 2010

Jill Zubrod-Hernandez

by Jill Zubrod-Hernandez MPH, Health Educator

This past summer was a flurry of 5-4-3-2-1 Go!™ outreach thanks to our wonderful partnership with Project SOAR. Project SOAR is a multifaceted family literacy program working with Head Start affiliated children, parents, and teens to develop literacy, leadership and employment skills. It is housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Learn more about Project SOAR here.

This has been a great example of a partner organization taking the 5-4-3-2-1 Go! message and running with it! First, I trained the Team Leaders in the message and taught them how to lead games that were developed to reinforce the message recommendations. (Learn more about CLOCC’s 5-4-3-2-1 Go! message here.) Then the message spread like wildfire as the Team Leaders trained their Teen Nutrition Aides (200+ teens) in the message and related activities. Once trained and ready to spread the message, the teens were deployed to 70+ sites across Chicago participating in the Summer Nutrition Program. In total, over 1,250 children were reached with the 5-4-3-2-1 Go! message multiple times throughout the summer. For more information on Project SOAR, contact Sam Austin, Youth Team Leader, at saustin3@uic.edu or 312-413-7403.

Children at one center applying what they have learned by sorting food and activity model cards into categories based on the 5-4-3-2-1 Go! message.

Teen Nutrition Aides commonly got the request to do “stations” with the preschool age kids. Here are children in two stations, one mastering their hula hoop skills, while the other practices tossing and catching a ball.

Following their physical activity stations, the Teen Aides made sure to have the children stretch out!

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