A farmer's market is a lot of fun—for parents only, usually. Kids often just tag along, glumly, as their parents busily shop for fresh fruits and vegetables. That is, until the Market Sprouts Kids Club. Kaely Summers and other farmer's market managers in Oregon teamed up to create the Market Sprouts Kids Club program to teach Latino kids and other kids who come to the market about farming, fresh produce, and healthy eating. Now kids ages 5-12 who visit local markets, like Summers' Forest Grove Farmer's Market in Forest Grove, Ore., (23.1% Latino), do fun, interactive activities alongside farmers and volunteers who teach about healthier foods and healthier choices!
Farmer's Markets and Children in Oregon
Officials with Adelante Mujeres, a non-profit organization focusing on ...
Many Latino kids live in “recreation deserts,” which lack access to safe, affordable physical activity opportunities. Therefore, they often do not meet daily physical activity recommendations and are at increased risk for obesity. One way to reduce these barriers and increase physical activity among Latino children is to provide free, safe recreation facilities in their neighborhood with culturally relevant programming. Two community-driven initiatives in Multnomah County, Ore., have crossed paths in their efforts to reduce recreation deserts in disadvantaged neighborhoods by building and fixing soccer fields and futsal courts.
Soccer Loving Kids Live in Recreation Desert
Oregon residents Shawn Levy and Ricki Ruiz love soccer and know it is good for kids and adults. But each ...
What so great about beans? Grad student Kelly Atterberry and mentor Carol Miles have the answer in their new bean-based garden and nutrition curriculum for K-12 students in Washington. By encouraging kids to learn to garden and try nutritious pulse crops (beans, lentils, peas, etc.), they hope the curriculum can help combat obesity and diet-related health problems among children.
Why Beans?
Kelly Atterberry originally wanted to go nursing school. Then she learned about agriculture and growing healthy food while working on a farm and again later while working in the Agriculture Research Station at Washington State University (WSU) in Mount Vernon, Wash. (33.7 % Latino). So she switched her career course. As a grad student at WSU, she studied agriculture, which united her ...
In a Florida school district that didn’t provide health classes in high schools, a health educator, Risa Berrin, and her sister, Valerie Berrin, worked together to raise the bar on health education with their Health Information Project (HIP). HIP is a peer-to-peer program that allows students to teach each other about health problems, prevention, and how to access to local health resources toward reducing obesity, suicide, depression and other issues.
EMERGENCE
Awareness: Risa Berrin was a health reporter for her college newspaper when she first started seeing how teens were unaware or misinformed about health and prevention. She became part of the solution, starting a career as a certified human growth and reproductive health educator. While teaching law classes at a Miami-area ...
Can a rap song or graffiti art help kids eat healthier? Dr. Kevin Strong wanted to give it a shot and compete with the unhealthy marketing that kids—especially Latinos—are bombarded with daily. So founded the “Dunk the Junk” movement to work in schools and through social media to tailor health messages to kids in a fun way to counter junk food advertising. He uses rap, hip-hop dance, basketball, and graffiti art to change what kids think is cool to eat. “I love basketball and I would see a million junk food ads every time I watched,” Strong told Style101 Magazine. “I was just really saddened by the all children that are coming in [to my clinic] real young, devastated by junk food exposure.”
The Need for Counter Marketing
In his many years as a community ...
To inform and educate the San Antonio community on just how much sugar is in the beverages people consume daily, health officials and community leaders partnered to launch the bilingual Sugar-Packed marketing campaign. After San Antonio’s previous attempts to tackle sugary drink consumption fizzled out, Nelson Wolff, judge of Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, and his partners reignited a campaign against sugar with hopes to change the way residents look at sugar in beverages and its effect on health. The campaign includes print and online materials, including a sugar calculator tool, educational brochures, and posters.
EMERGENCE
Awareness: In 1997, Bexar County’s Health Collaborative formed as a coalition of health agencies that aim to improve the health status of the ...
When Latino kids choose to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables and less soda and chips, they set a good example for friends and family. But what if they can’t maintain their healthy lifestyle at school? Read what happens when youth leaders work with their school board to get healthy, vegan and vegetarian-approved lunch items into their cafeteria, not only to satisfy their desire to eat healthy but to empower other students to make healthier choices.
EMERGENCE
Awareness/Learn: For Sandra Garcia, it took planting a garden to realize just how powerful healthy food can be, not only for a community, but for a culture. “When SWU [Southwest Workers’ Union] started the Roots of Change Garden in 2007, I realized how beautiful it was to grow your own naturally organic food,” said ...
Latino and African American youth as well as individuals belonging to a local coalition of health leaders joined forces to launch Open Truth, a counter-advertising campaign that exposes big soda companies’ marketing tactics aimed at youth and communities of color. The result was a series of poems and videos created by youth, as well as dozens of ads viewed by millions, a website, and a viral social media campaign aimed at getting those targeted by soda companies to speak out against Big Soda. EMERGENCE Awareness: By 2008, Christina Goette of the San Francisco Public Health Department and Shape Up San Francisco (Shape Up SF), a coalition of community groups and leaders interested in preventing chronic disease and promoting better health for the region, were already very ...
In the predominantly Latino city of El Paso, Texas, kids are priority No. 1 thanks to a community-school partnership that prioritizes physical activity and health for children. The El Paso Independent School District (EPISD) created and its Get HIP Now program to provide elementary- and middle-school students with integrated school health programming, alongside before- and after-school physical activity.
EMERGENCE
Awareness: As early as 2005, leaders at the El Paso Independent School District (EPISD), an 83% Latino school district in El Paso, Texas, were becoming aware of student obesity issues. It seemed obvious that students could benefit from improvements to physical activity programing, according to John Adams, a P.E. instructor at the time who would eventually become the ...
