Category Archives: community partnerships

Advancing the Blueprint: A Profile of the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council

Posted on March 10, 2015

On January 8, 2013, CLOCC released the Blueprint for Accelerating Progress in Childhood Obesity Prevention in Chicago: The Next Decade. Each year, CLOCC invites our partners to weigh in, via survey, on their progress along the path set forth by the Blueprint. In coming months. CLOCC will feature these partners in this space, as well as on social media. For more information, contact info@clocc.net.

We had the recent opportunity to speak with Brighton Park Neighborhood Council (BPNC) Director of Organizing, Mariela Estrada, who was happy to tell us about the work BPNC is doing to train and support community health workers. These individuals provide culturally and linguistically appropriate community and in-home education integrating obesity prevention education into their services. Specifically related to the Blueprint, we learned about BPNC’s progress in the areas of Health Promotion, Physical Activity/Built Environment and Food Access.

Through a partnership with CLOCC, BPNC started training health promoters to perform walkability assessments, provide nutrition education and disseminate information to the community regarding the role of the built environment in the obesity epidemic. BPNC believes that training health workers on obesity prevention education is vital to improving overall community health and that providing obesity prevention education at schools is directly aligned with its mission to provide youth services.

BPNC’s School-based Parent Health Promoter Program has parent leaders at four local schools developing family health education programs, family fitness programs and health and nutrition programs. The fitness programs offer popular classes such as Zumba and yoga at a low cost. These programs provide a venue for health communication through parent and student engagement. BPNC’s Parent Patrol program also encourages physical activity; parents volunteer at schools during entry and dismissal times so that those who want to walk feel safe enough to do so. Much of BPNC’s work in this area serves the Blueprint’s goal to “Create, expand, or improve community environments where children can be physically active,” supporting street/sidewalk environmental change approaches.

Through its Health Promoter program, BPNC trains community leaders about making healthy choices and how to disseminate that information to the community. Health Promoters learn about nutrition, mental health and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Training is provided on heart health, chronic disease and general obesity trends. Health documentaries such as Weight of the Nation and others are also utilized during training sessions.

Much of BPNC’s work serves to address the Health Promotion goals of the Blueprint Specifically, goal 3.1, which states “Provide programming to build health literacy, knowledge, and skills around healthy eating and physical activity in communities experiencing high levels of obesity.” In order to expand nutrition education, BPNC Health Promoters were trained to implement education with sensitivity to community culture. Additionally, a local chef provided a cooking demonstration that included a culturally-competent, healthy preparation of a Thanksgiving turkey.

BPNC Photo

BPNC’s grocery store challenge helped introduce the MyPlate Guidelines

The first round of nutrition education trainings, funded by CLOCC, introduced the MyPlate guidelines. One of the tactics included in the Blueprint is to provide education about preparing nutritious meals on a limited budget for families experiencing food insecurity. Those who attended the class were eligible to participate in a grocery store challenge, where participants on a grocery tour were challenged to spend just $5 and purchase healthy ingredients that would create a meal for a family of four. Health Promoters emphasized tips such as looking for nutritious items on sale, avoiding shopping while hungry and also clarified misconceptions regarding the differences in canned, frozen and fresh food. The second round of trainings was coordinated through the UIC School of Public Health; the trainings took place twice a week for eight weeks and were provided free of charge through free resources and volunteer speakers.

BPNC identified its main community health objectives as implementing 5-4-3-2-1 Go! ® through work with CLOCC, (improving nutrition, increasing physical activity and decreasing screen time), performing health assessments and improving access to health care.

BPNC’s Health Promoters are very engaged in Council activities and are essential in keeping community residents informed of upcoming events. They utilize fliers, word of mouth, local newspapers, school bulletins and school calendars. BPNC is satisfied with the level of community engagement and attendance at their events; over 300 people attended a recent health fair.

The Council reports seeing changes in the community such as increased parent awareness regarding healthy food consumption and the importance of physical activity. These changes are indicated by community residents through self-evaluations conducted once a year, as well as anecdotal evidence on making lifestyle changes at home and engaging kids in after school activities.

Moving forward, BPNC has set a goal to decrease obesity in the community by 3 percent in the next 10 years. The Council is working to secure resources to expand its obesity prevention education, especially nutrition education classes for young people and providing popular fitness classes at low cost to encourage physical activity. Additionally, the health subcommittee in the Brighton Park coalition continues to focus on linking residents to health care providers and health education resources that would be otherwise unavailable or unaffordable.

 

Making a Splash: Perspectives Middle Academy’s Water Challenge

Posted on August 1, 2014

A student taking the Water Challenge

By Amissah Seals, ELEV8 Program Manager

Though Perspectives Middle Academy (PMA) encourages its scholars to live healthy lifestyles by providing fresh healthy lunches and enacting a no soda machine policy, many of our scholars still struggle with obesity. There are also a high number of students with diabetes and other illnesses that are closely linked to how and what we eat. Even with a “no soda policy” water is not always the first choice when picking a beverage. Many of the juices and sports drinks that our scholars have access to are loaded with sugar. We wanted to show our scholars that a small change to their diet could improve their energy, help them lose weight and become more active. What better way than through simply drinking more water! With support from CLOCC as a part of the Healthy Schools Initiative focused on creating healthier school environments, ELEV8 embarked on a campaign to get our scholars to drink more water.

On February 28, we kicked off the ELEV8 at PMA Water Challenge with a lively pep rally! The scholar Health Ambassadors made a presentation called “WHY WATER?” They spoke earnestly with their fellow scholars about the health benefits of water and why we felt the need to try to challenge the PMA student body to drink more water. They explained that the challenge would last 10 weeks. We showed a video featuring Mrs. Michelle Obama extolling the virtues of water and our PMA Warriors cheerleading team lead us in a few cheers to get the scholars excited about the challenge ahead.

Our goal was to increase students’ and faculty members’ water intake by 48 ounces a day. We started by purchasing two cold filtered water machines. This move alone had the entire Perspectives Auburn Gresham campus excited! One of the many complaints we heard when asking students about why they did not drink the water available to them in the cafeteria or in the regular water fountains was the taste and that it was never cold! In addition, we purchased water bottles for the entire student body, faculty and staff. There were no excuses not to get your daily dose of fresh clean water. Our health ambassadors hung the marketing materials and made daily reminders during advisory periods. Ultimately we hoped to increase our schools water intake by 760,000 ounces by the end of the 10 week challenge.

The stage was set, but we met a few challenges along the way. One of the major problems we encountered was how to record the amount of water each student drank. We settled on an “honor system” where students added multicolored stickers to large bulletin boards placed near each water machine and in the cafeteria. Another issue we faced was the scholars losing water bottles.

For the most part our challenge went quite well. With the guidance of our health coordinator, Anya Cawthon, the PMA Health Ambassadors presented during lunch time and during “A Disciplined Life” (ADL) classes, reminding students of the benefits of drinking more water and living a healthy lifestyle. Though we fell slightly short of our 760,000 ounce goal, we managed to have nearly 80% of the student body retain their water bottles for the remainder of the school year. We also inspired both of the high schools to plan a water challenge for the Fall of 2014. A lasting effect of the water challenge is that Perspectives Auburn Gresham Campus will have access to cold filtered water for years to come.

From Michelle Hill – 6th grade student at Perspectives Middle Academy:

I am a sixth grade scholar here at Perspectives Middle Academy. Ms. Cawton asked me to join the Health Ambassadors to help give me some focus. At first I was scared to talk in front of the whole school about drinking water. I thought that they would not listen to me because water isn’t that interesting. Then we started learning about how water can help you stay healthy. Our school really likes to be competitive and do challenges against the other classes. I thought I would really like to help my advisory win the challenge.

The hardest part was getting all the scholars to remember to bring their water bottles with them every day. By the middle of the challenge I really started to like drinking water more. Especially when we could sometimes add lemon juice! I think the Water Challenge was really fun, and we should do it again next year!

Promoting “Salud”: CLOCC Focuses on Latino Health

Posted on March 20, 2014

Daney Ramirez and Jaime Arteaga

By Jaime Arteaga, CLOCC Community Programs Coordinator, and Daney Ramirez, CLOCC Food Environment Coordinator

On February 7, 2014. DePaul University hosted the Health Disparities and Social Justice Conference.  With a special focus on Latino health, the conference offered a valuable space for dialogue among a range of health and community experts who share DePaul’s mission to address social injustices and community health practices in marginalized groups. Presenters provided a training opportunity to increase public health skills in identifying and addressing a wide variety of health disparities in diverse communities.  We are excited to participate and represent CLOCC at this event.

I (Jaime) was a panelist for the ¡Vive Tu Vida! A Model for Creating Healthy Social Experiences and Systems in Low Socio-Economic Status Hispanic Communities workshop where I highlighted the importance and need for walkable communities to promote active transportation by residents.  To support this, CLOCC has a Neighborhood Walkability Assessment Tool that offers straightforward solutions that help lay the foundation for living an active, safe and healthy lifestyle. Participants also learned about Active Transportation’s Better Blocks work which produces community walking ambassadors and promote walking groups; The American Heart Association’s Walking Paths program which uses a fun online tool and phone app to design free and safe routes in communities that promotes walking, brings neighbors together, and provides valuable history lessons; and LISC’s Play Streets initiative that activates community space and spurs physical activity in communities that either lack green space or safe space for residents to enjoy.  At the end of the session, participants were able to define and apply steps in the assessment process, test an online tool to create customized paths in their communities, and learn how to become walking advocates in their neighborhoods.

I (Daney), along with CLOCC School and Community Initiatives Manager Anna Barnes, presented findings from our Healthy Mobile Vending project.  As a part of Healthy CPS, our Healthy Mobile Vending Project works to provide education and support to schools and mobile food vendors at twenty-five K-8 elementary schools located on the Southwest side of Chicago.  Currently, a significant number of CPS students, primarily in predominately Latino communities, have access to a large variety of foods and beverages sold by mobile food vendors before and after school.   As such, this project primarily focuses on building the capacity of mobile food vendors to offer and sell healthy food items, by empowering them to understand the importance of topics such as healthy eating, nutrition labels, and recipes modifications.  The goal of the project is to increase the availability of healthy options available from mobile food vendors for these students. CLOCC works to achieve this goal through a number of intervention strategies including: offering training and technical assistance to vendors, engaging parents and students in nutrition workshops, launching a school based social marketing campaign that promotes healthy snacking, distributing educational and promotional materials and building community-wide support. Those strategies, as well as lessons learned from the project were discussed.

This was a great opportunity to not only share CLOCC’s walkability and mobile vending work, but also to learn about other important initiatives going on in Chicago that support Latino health (or salud in Spanish).   Want to know more about CLOCC’s work?  Contact Jaime at jarteaga@luriechildrens.org or Daney at deramirez@luriechildrens.org.

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!