Healthy Weight: Information for Community Based Organizations

Community based organizations can help people eat smart and move more! Community nutrition and physical activity programs can provide individuals with knowledge, skills, motivation, social support and the opportunities necessary to make healthy choices. Community based organizations like community centers, boys and girls clubs and places of worship often encourage their participants to eat smart and move more through evidence based nutrition and physical activity programs.

What you should do

Offer opportunities for people to be more physically active

• Implement We Can!, a turn key childhood obesity prevention program. We Can! helps parents and children make healthier decisions around physical activity and nutrition.
• Implement Shape Up Rhode Island a statewide exercise and weight loss program that uses the power of teamwork to help people succeed.

Offer opportunities for people to eat healthily

• Implement We Can!, a turn key childhood obesity prevention program, to help parents and children make healthier decisions around physical activity and nutrition.
• Start the Operation Frontline nutrition education program
• Bring Kids Chose to Be Healthy, a nutrition education and physical activity  program for children, to your organization or refer families to the program.

Become an advocate for a community environment that makes eating smart and moving more the easy choices

• Educate community leaders and policy makers about how they can make eating smart and moving more easier for residents.
• Host a viewing of Unnatural Causes, a video series documenting the link between the social and physical environment, inequalities, and health.
• Start a discussion with community members and leaders about how your community’s environment can better support healthy eating and active living.
• Start or join a local coalition or advocacy group that promotes a healthier community. Help build your community’s capacity to make policy and environmental changes.
• Get involved with your community’s update of their Comprehensive Plan to make sure recreation, access to healthy foods, walkable neighborhoods, and neighborhood safety are priorities in your community.