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Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) whose primary goal is to implement healthy eating and active living policy- and environmental-change initiatives that can support healthier communities for children and families across the United States. Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities places special emphasis on reaching children who are at highest risk for obesity on the basis of race/ethnicity, income and/or geographic location.

Through the program, RWJF seeks to catalyze and support communities’ efforts to address the root causes of childhood obesity through integrated changes in policies, norms, practices, social supports and the physical environment. Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities:

  1. provides tools and assistance to help funded communities sustain systems, policies and environmental changes that support healthy eating and active living, especially among children who are at highest risk for obesity;
  2. collaborates with other RWJF-funded initiatives to help drive wide-scale change;
  3. supports experienced local leaders who will serve as ambassadors and mentors for communities that are working to prevent childhood obesity;
  4. applies research findings and evaluation results to help communities implement the most effective strategies for increasing physical activity and improving nutrition for kids; and
  5. informs the public and policy debate on childhood obesity by sharing insight about initiatives with the greatest potential for wide-scale change that will help to reverse the epidemic.

Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities is assisting 50 community partnerships across the country. They are listed here.  More information about the 41 new communities can be found here.

Baldwin Park, CA was featured on January 7, 2010 on CBS Evening News as a solution to childhood obesity. You can see the video clip here and the news story can be read here.

Somerville, MA was featured on January 3, 2010 on CBS Sunday Morning as a successful example of school and community change impacting childhood obesity. You can see the video clip here.