Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children: Building Capacity for Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change Through a Multi-Sector Coalition for Obesity Prevention in Chicago, IL

This panel of papers describes a variety of approaches used by the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children (CLOCC) to advance policy, systems, and environmental change for childhood obesity prevention in Chicago. The panel begins with a brief overview of CLOCC, its history, composition, goals, and major accomplishments. The first paper describes two strategies to change the food environments in public buildings and park district locations through healthy machine vending initiatives and presents data on the environmental changes that occurred. The second paper describes a multi-prong strategy to improve the school food environment by focusing on mobile food vendors outside of schools and a marketing campaign to build demand for healthy items sold by vendors. The third paper describes an approach to organizational change that supports out-of-school time program provider organizations as they make environmental change to support healthy eating and physical activity for participating children and families. The fourth paper presents steps taken to support labor and delivery hospitals to make policy and practice changes to increase breastfeeding among post-partum women and their infants. The final paper describes the coalition's participatory process to creating a multi-sector policy agenda and the strategies used to monitor policy implementation. The panel closes with key lessons learned from 12 years of coalition building and PSE change for childhood obesity prevention in Chicago. Included abstracts are: 332180, 332367, 332365, 333248, and 333670.