Community Healthy Living Index: Assessing Early Childhood programs for supportive policy and practices

The Community Healthy Living Index (CHLI) is a set of community assessment tools that measure opportunities for physical activity and healthy eating in schools, afterschool settings , neighborhoods, worksites, and community-at-large. These tools include a discussion/planning guide that moves the assessment into action planning for improvements. The YMCA of the USA, in partnership with Stanford Prevention Research Center, created a new tool for early childhood programs (ECP) that serve infants through 6 years. This tool complements the existing CHLI tools and was created to respond to community demand. In 2005, 61% of children aged 0-6 participated in a ECP. This is a critical time in children's lives, ECP are pivotal to establish a child's learning and behavior preferences by intentionally promoting the health and well-being of children through policies and practices that support healthy choices. Recognizing this, states are actively adopting model healthy eating and physical activity guidance to improve or enhance ECP and this tool will serve to support this process.

The ECP tool development included community led cognitive response testing and inter-rater reliability testing to ensure assessment instrument validity. Similar to the original CHLI tools, the ECP tool provides a process for community stakeholders to assess and create an action plan to improve the policy and environment related to physical activity and healthy eating in this setting. Findings from the ECP assessment and lessons learned from the field will be shared to provide details on the direct application of the use of the tool by communities.