Starting May 3, 2016, Kaboom will award $1 million in prizes through their Play Everywhere Challenge, in collaboration with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Target, Playworld, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Play Everywhere Challenge is a national competition for community-driven solutions that integrate play into everyday life and unexpected places, like sidewalks, vacant lots, bus stops, open streets, and beyond. Applicants should consider replicable, scalable innovations in city redevelopment and design that will help make play easy, available, and fun for kids and families. Cities are prime settings for innovative active spaces initiatives because city design impacts human behavior, thus cities have the ...
According to figures released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the birthrate among American teenagers has fallen to an all-time low. Once at crisis levels in the 1990s, the past decade has seen unprecedented declines and has taken place in all regions of the country and among all races, including Latinos, where numbers have been historically high. The birthrate among Latino teens has declined by nearly 50% since 2006. Theories on why this shift has occurred range from improved approaches to sex education and the proliferation of broadband Internet. Access to contraception is also seen as a key component to this new downward trend. “There has been a change in social norms that has happened in the past 20 years, and the idea of not having sex or delaying sex ...
By May next year (2017), convenience stores, movie theaters, supermarkets and chain food establishments will officially have calorie labels for consumers, helping them to see the healthy choice easier. Many restaurants including Starbucks, Panera, McDonalds and Subway and others have all already added calorie labels to menus , however, the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) released the final guidance for all food establishments to have implemented policy changes by early May 2017. According to the FDA Americans eat and drink one-third of their calories away from home. According to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, children eat almost twice as many calories when they eat a meal at a restaurant compared to a meal at home and says the measure could help prevent 41 ...
UPDATE on February 2016 post Minnesota DOE Releases Statewide Swimming Resources Inventory and Work Group Reports: Now What?. On April 6, 2016, Minnesota Representative Karen Clark introduced HF 3830, and Minnesota Senator Patricia Torres Ray introduced companion bill SF 3472, directing the Department of Education to employ a swimming and water safety specialist and appropriate money. This comes after the Minnesota Department of Education report on swimming resources inventory. Section 1. SWIMMING AND WATER SAFETY SPECIALIST. The Department of Education must employ a swimming and water safety specialist to develop a model kindergarten through grade 12 swimming and water safety curriculum and implementation guidelines, and develop and provide professional ...
Supervisor Mark Farrell announced a new legislation , written with help from the American Heart Association, to ban sugary beverages and junk food across all vending machines on city property. According to a recent news article, the legislation states that 60 percent of the city's employee health costs are driven by the 24 percent of the city's health plan members dealing with chronic health conditions. The legislation works in conjunction with helping the health of city employees by working towards encouraging healthier foods in all 150 vending machines across the city, including the airport and City Hall, as well as implementing new city meetings gathered around healthier food. The ban would only allow snacks with fewer than 200 calories per serving with no more than 35 percent ...
According to the National Hispanic Medical Association (NHMA), Latinos have seen the biggest benefit from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as they have had the largest decrease in uninsured rates of any racial or ethnic group in the country. The rate, according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), fell from 41.8% to 30.5% from October 2014 to February 2016. However, more work still needs to be done as there is still a large need for Spanish-speaking doctors, dentists, and other health care professionals. “We now need to do more education and outreach,” said NHMA President Elena Rios to the group’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. last week. “We need to be able to identify and encourage the next generation to be of service in our Latino community.” Getting ...
The Bike Club at Brooklyn Center Secondary in Minneapolis, Minnesota (10.5% Latino) started in the Summer of 2014 during LEAP Program and transitioned into a two day a week program during the following school year to fix brakes, replace rusty chains, and align frames, with funding from a 21st Century Community Learning Center grant and Hennepin County Statewide Health Improvement Program. Brooklyn Center Secondary also began providing Bike Alliance of Minnesota Walk! Bike! Fun! curriculum, which is free for educators and schools to download and use. Walk! Bike! Fun! is a comprehensive curriculum developed by the Bicycle Alliance of Minnesota through a federal Safe Routes to School grant provided by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and in collaboration with the Center ...
Westford Elementary school is working with Fresh Start Food Gardens and Circle Health to bring fresh fruits and vegetables into the diets of their students, promoting healthy eating with a "seed to stomach" process. The partnership has helped bring in two raised beds for school gardens that have let students plant seeds and harvest their own plants, learning how to care for the produce they will consume in the coming months. The students at Crisafulli Elementary School will also get to enjoy new garden beds for planting as well. Christine Berthold, one of the creators of Fresh Start Food Gardens explained in the local news article that kids who grow their own vegetables are more apt to eat them and she thinks that it will be great for the kids to be a part of the entire growing ...
Tennessee Clean Water Network is working to "Bring Tap Back". The nonprofit organization promotes clean water and healthy communities and has been a part of local visits to schools to encourage to use free water bottles to drink water and educate kids about the importance of consuming fewer sodas and sugary beverages. The "Bring Tap Back" initiative was funded by a three-year Project Diabetes grant from the Tenn. Dept. of Health. that has helped provide water bottle refill stations across the state. In Knoxville, Tenn. 80 water bottle refill stations have helped people trade sugary drinks for water to reduce risks of obesity and diabetes. Sodas, sports drinks, unnaturally sweetened juices and other sugary beverages are known to increase risks of diabetes and obesity in Latino ...
