Harlem Children’s Zone® (HCZ) is a leader in the fight against childhood obesity. Anchored in best practices and research, HCZ created Healthy Ways to help HCZ youth and the Harlem community build lifelong healthy habits that support learning, achievement, and growth.
Healthy Ways is designed to positively affect health outcomes by:
- Increasing nutrition knowledge, healthy eating, and physical activity in youth to limit undesirable weight gain and prevent childhood obesity
- Providing targeted interventions for youth who have overweight or obesity
- Creating a culture of health through the adoption of policy and environmental supports that make the healthy choice the easy choice
Recognizing the importance of scaling successful, multi-level, evidence-based childhood obesity prevention programs, ChildObesity180 partners with HCZ to replicate Healthy Ways in other communities nationwide and generate new research by rigorously evaluating the replication process.
During Phase One of this work, ChildObesity180 worked with HCZ to codify program elements and identify contextual and organizational factors critical for successful implementation of Healthy Ways. We gained a number of insights from this process that have guided development of criteria for selecting new partner communities and organizations, strategies to prime new stakeholders for initial and ongoing success, and factors to consider for implementation and evaluation at new sites.
During Phase Two of this work, ChildObesity180 will work with new communities and organizations to replicate Healthy Ways, evaluate implementation in those new communities, and make adaptations to the replication process to optimize future scaling efforts.
Photograph courtesy of Harlem Children’s Zone®