How Food & Fitness Community Partnerships Successfully Engaged Youth

Abstract

Authentic youth engagement was a central component of the Food & Fitness (F&F) Initiative, a 9-year community-based intervention, whose goal was to ensure that all children have equitable access to healthy food and built environments that promote safe physical activity. The youth engagement component focused on strategies and structures that would support a model framework for youth involved in F&F community partnerships. These strategies empowered youth by providing the leadership and technical skills needed in collaborative efforts to sustain change in communities with inequities, where structural racism and inequities result in poor health outcomes for children. This article describes the models that the diverse urban and rural communities across the United States employed to successfully engage youth in the vision and work of F&F and discusses overall lessons learned, challenges, and best practices/recommendations for effectively engaging youth in community-determined change.

Integrating nutrition and physical activity promotion: A scoping review

“…Interventions that impact on health and wellbeing of adolescents (e.g. through increased opportunities for healthy eating, and increased uptake of moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) components) offer second chances to the most disadvantaged [43,50,51,53]. Investments in adolescent health and wellbeing bring benefits not only in their future adult life, but also for the next generation of children as future parents.…”

“…There is evidence of increased moderate or vigorous physical activity, replacement of flavoured milk with non-fat or regular milk, modest improvements in mean numbers of healthy food items served per day, increase in awareness of healthy labelling through promotional materials and healthy food labels but no significant increase in purchase of fruit and vegetables or other healthy items [43], increase in caregivers' nutrition-related efficacy beliefs, increased knowledge on healthy diets and physical activity in children and caregivers [51]. Whilst a definition or exact measure of wellbeing is not specified in these studies, the development of actionable guiding principles for healthy eating and physical activity in OST platforms is often combined with an existing portfolio of national initiatives that blends science and business strengths to prevent childhood obesity, with general health and wellbeing as broad outcomes [41,43,45,50,52,53].…”

“…One programme, aimed primarily at children from vulnerable populations (i.e., rural, remote, northern, aboriginal and multicultural communities across Canada) which employed similar strategies, however, was found to have limited effectiveness [51], with healthier cooking and eating choices and play-based physical activity being reported during implementation of the programme, but with no long-term effectiveness. Importantly, motivation has been found to be stronger when beneficiaries are involved, supported and encouraged [43,49,53]. Comprehensive evaluations that systematically highlight areas of success and challenges are not available for most programmes, which present self-reported changes in awareness and behaviour but no objective measurement of their extent, making it difficult to compare interventions [38,51].…”

“…But this does not imply that we ignore the needs of other affected populations. Studies here report multiple benefits of targeting affected populations later in the lifecourse, including targeting of adolescents [45,50,53]; or targeting adults in the workplace for prevention and control of comorbidities later in life [55][56][57]. High risk groups can also be specifically targeted via referral services or community and home outreach [34,39,46,49,51].…”

“…Across the studies we also see the importance of understanding the wider context of implementation highlighted repeatedly. Programmes require tailoring to the social, economic, cultural, and demographic features of a region, with attention paid to identification of the best strategies in relation to age, gender, socioeconomic status, cultural identities and spheres of influence of the participants [51,53,58,62]. Engagement with local stakeholders and placebased planning of strategies is key to sustained change [43,54], ensuring relevance to people's day to day lives, and the identification of community-specific barriers to uptake and adherence.…”