Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children: A Coalition Approach to Developing a Proactive Policy Agenda for Obesity Prevention

The Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children (CLOCC), founded in 2002, is a multi-sector coalition of organizations working in Chicago and beyond to advance a childhood obesity prevention agenda. A key element of this agenda is advocating for policy, systems, and environmental change (PSE) that support healthy eating and safe opportunities for physical activity for children throughout the Chicago area. In 2010, as the childhood obesity prevention field began to clarify the key targets for PSE approaches, CLOCC saw the need to create a policy agenda that reflected the national wisdom while maintaining local relevance. This agenda would govern the coalition's policy work for five years. Because CLOCC includes more than 3,000 individuals representing 1,200+ organizations and because these participants would need to be mobilized for the successful advancement of the policy agenda, CLOCC staff and leaders knew that a participatory approach to developing the agenda would be imperative. Over the course of a year, CLOCC staff and advisors facilitated a participatory approach to developing a policy agenda that included policy targets in diverse priority issues; including: food access, physical activity, schools, breastfeeding, transportation, and more. This paper will describe the year-long participatory process, highlight some of the key policy priorities, describe the strategies used to advance these priorities, and discuss the current approaches to monitoring implementation of the policies. This paper will conclude with the current process in development for "refreshing" the policy agenda for the next five years.