Warm up to winter: Encouraging winter activity among refugee and immigrant youth in Maine

There are approximately 1000 students from Sub-Saharan Africa in public schools in Lewiston and Portland, Maine. Somali immigrants make up a substantial proportion of this population. This refugee population in Maine faces a great challenge to stay physically active for multiple reasons, including relocating to a relatively cold climate, change of diet and exercise habits, decreased community involvement, and most importantly, language barriers. WinterKids is a non-profit organization designed to help children get more active in the wintertime. One program, Welcome to Winter, focuses on educating immigrants and their children about winter in Maine and encourages increased wintertime activity. This is an easy and fun way for these children to stay healthy, get involved in their community, learn about winter, and learn a new activity at the same time. We will describe the impact of this program in the Maine communities with high proportions of African immigrants and the evaluation program that we developed to assess barriers to increased participation. Utilizing focus groups of Somali community members and of youth participants, we aim to increase opportunity for African immigrant and refugee youth to be active in winter. This is a crucial step to helping them develop lifelong healthy activity habits. WinterKids is a community based activity program with public health benefits which will address the real and perceived barriers, teach the necessary skills and get immigrant kids outside to be active and vigorous in our winter weather.