A community perspective on the ARRA Communities Putting Prevention to Work application process

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) public-private partnership in California proved instrumental in enabling Kern County Department of Public Health (DPH) and its community partners, in California's Central Valley, to compete for this federal funding. With the partnership's support, Kern County DPH staff undertook a proposal larger than any they had previously tackled; and, the process brought together two major agencies with significant impact across the county, Kern County DPH and Kern County Superintendent of Schools. Kern County recognized an opportunity to extend many locally successful approaches to healthy eating and active living, through environmental and policy change, into other parts of the county, and to sustain strong programs that were about to sunset. Three years of community partnerships developed through CCROPP, the Central California Regional Obesity Prevention Program, gave the DPH a solid base from which to build the proposal. CCROPP-Kern community partners supported the proposal development by agreeing to expand and develop many of their resident and youth centered models that had been considered in the creation of the stimulus funding. To receive support, participating counties committed to a list of agreements set out by the California Convergence, including a commitment to shared obesity prevention policy priorities, and a commitment that recipient counties would leverage ARRA resources in ways that would benefit the state as a whole. This strengthened county commitment to environmental and policy change approaches to healthy eating and active living within both agencies, and aligned us with health departments across the state in our mission to affect policies and environments that impact our health.