Shaping America's youth: Engaging communities in childhood obesity prevention efforts

Background and Objective: Shaping America's Youth (SAY), a public/private initiative, is comprised of three elements designed to integrate families and communities in the effort to improve childhood nutrition and physical activity: a national survey of programs, a website with comprehensive information on childhood obesity and a searchable program registry, and town meetings involving diverse individuals. SAY is committed to resolving the obesity crisis.

Methods: SAY's website provides the first-ever national program registry and comprehensive source of information on childhood overweight. In town meetings SAY gathers input regarding challenges and solutions for curbing childhood overweight. Meetings have been held in Memphis and Dallas with many others planned. SAY is developing a community-based action plan to establish a common language and standards for goals that individuals, families, and communities can implement, based on information acquired from the these sources along with stakeholder organizations, to improve our children's health and our nation's future.

Results: A summary report, based on the national survey, was released by the US Surgeon General in September 2004. The SAY program registry was acknowledged in the recent Institute of Medicine report as the nation's benchmark of community level efforts. Over 2600 programs are registered and nearly 1300 have completed the survey. The second SAY survey was released in November 2006.

Conclusions and Implications: The SAY initiative has served as an exemplary model for other community-based efforts including the Balance it Out: Arkansas program which exemplifies the community-based public/private collaborative approach to addressing childhood obesity espoused by SAY.