Home: Background: Community Grants

Community Grants

To achieve stated goals, The Endowment awarded funding over four years to a local collaborative in each of six communities throughout California. In each local collaborative, three entities received grants:

• Community Partners - Local community-based coalitions or collaborative groups with experience and capacity to effect change in their community in this arena are critical to the success of the program. They are mobilizing and engaging community members and organizations, and serve as a springboard for community action. Kaiser Permanente, as a major partner for the overall program, is a valuable local partner in areas where they are actively engaged in obesity prevention.
• School District - As both an agent for change and an important environment for changes that improve nutrition and physical activity for children, school districts with a commitment to improving children's health and a demonstrated record of achievement in the nutrition or physical activity arena play a vital role.
• Local Public Health Department - As the government agency charged with protecting and promoting the health of the community, the local public health department is an essential partner for long-term sustainability and will support efforts to link policy interventions and broader campaigns to obesity and diabetes prevention and to the elimination of health disparities.

Local collaboratives address the program objectives by working to change the environment in each of the following five sectors:

• Schools
• After-school programs
• Neighborhoods
• Food and beverage marketing and advertising
• Health care

Combined, these approaches are establishing food and physical activity environments that significantly impact children's behavior and community norms.

The specific goals for change in each of these sectors are:

1. Schools

• Enforce SB12 or similar standards in public school grades K-8 and expand implementation of these standards through grade 12 to reduce access to unhealthy foods and beverages.
• Enforce current California Department of Education physical education (PE) standards for grades K - 12.
• Engage parents, youth and families to become stronger advocates for school-level change through:
  1. Training on assessing school food and physical activity environments.
  2. Training and engagement as spokespersons to present assessment findings to opinion leaders and policy-makers.
  3. Involvement in the strategy and solution development process.
  4. Active engagement in policy advocacy to improve food and physical activity environments.
  5. Participation in program implementation and evaluation.

2. After-School Programs

• Apply SB12 nutrition standards for all foods and beverages served by after-school programs.
• Develop, disseminate, adopt and enforce physical activity standards for after school programs and include a physical activity component in all after-school programs.
• Engage parents, youth and families to become stronger advocates for systems and policies that improve after school programs.

3. Neighborhoods

• Engage parents, youth and families as advocates to pursue improvements in neighborhood food and physical activity environments through the following:
  1. Conducting environmental assessments that will lead to the development and implementation of policies and programs to assure access to healthy foods, including grocery stores and farmers markets, in low-resource neighborhoods. Policies may include guidelines for model zoning, transportation and community design.
  2. Conducting environmental assessments that will lead to the development and implementation of policies and programs to assure access to safe and appealing physical activity opportunities for families in low-resource neighborhoods. Policies may include guidelines for model zoning, transportation and community design.

4. Health Care

• Ensure the participation of the health care sector, including community clinics, in community collaboratives addressing obesity/diabetes prevention.
• Engage providers and the medical community in prevention efforts by linking patient education to community prevention efforts.
• Work with health care partners, such as Kaiser Permanente, community clinics, and the California Medical Association, to define the role of the health care system in prevention and to create definitions, evaluation mechanisms and identify incentives.

5. Marketing and Advertising

• Advocate for policies and system changes at the local level that will limit or eliminate food and beverage advertising and marketing in school and after school settings, discourage targeted marketing in neighborhoods and encourage local regulatory action to reduce advertising in popular media to children.
• Mobilize parents, youth, families and community leaders and enlist them in conducting assessments of local food and beverage marketing such as advertising on billboards and in local stores, focusing on youth environments and their surrounding neighborhoods.
• Engage and train youth as advocates for changing food and beverage marketing policies and practices.

Local efforts of community collaboratives include strategies that are culturally appropriate and that build cultural competence within each sector. Grantee collaboratives are expected to engage in strategic planning, including assessing assets and needs, identifying priority issues for intervention, designing and carrying out interventions, and evaluating results on an ongoing basis to support or modify intervention strategies.

Click here to download the program LOGIC MODEL (69k Excel Document)

Click here to see the community Grantee Profiles