Last year we received funding from CDC to implement the Communities Putting Prevention to Work, which aims to achieve broad reaching, highly impactful, and sustainable change to reduce chronic disease burden associated with obesity and tobacco.
This week CDC notified us that Arizona is a “high performing” state. What does this mean? CDC will soon be visiting Arizona providing additional evaluation support to determine whether or not our program will be used as a “best practice” example for other states. Why did Arizona receive this award? In just 15 months, our team has leveraged our grant resources to improve physical activity and nutrition and cut tobacco use in Arizona schools, hospitals, worksites, and childcare facilities. Here are few examples of what the team has accomplished so far:
- Trained over 20 hospitals and 2000 nurses on maternity care practices that encourage mothers to breastfeed and keep breastfeeding.
- Helped create healthy schools where students can be physically active and have access to healthy foods, like fruits and vegetables.
- Trained more than 200 school staff and partners to assess their nutrition and physical activity programs and policies using the CDC’s School Health Index.
- Inspired over 500 parents, teachers, and administrators to create healthy change at their school with our new School Health Advisory Council Video.
- Helped schools examine barriers that keep students from walking and biking to school safely by completing our online assessment, the Active School Neighborhood Checklist.
Imagine how many more Arizonans our team will impact with 9 more months to go! Congrats to our Nutrition and Physical Activity and their CPPW team!
