The local business coalition bent on cutting the fat in Chatham County children just received a healthy funding grant to make it happen.
Healthy living organizations the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and United Health Foundation this week awarded the Savannah Business Group a $100,000 grant to continue its child obesity awareness outreach.
The Savannah Business Group is a health care group purchasing coalition of several of the area’s largest employers, including the city and county governments, the Georgia Ports Authority, Gulfstream, JCB, International Paper and the St. Joseph’s Candler Health System.
The organization launched its childhood obesity campaign two years ago via a planning grant from the Robert Wood Johnson and United Health foundations. The Savannah Business Group used that money to research, prepare and publish a study, titled Childhood Obesity in Chatham County, which outlines the local struggles of overweight kids and proposed ideas to address the issue.
The new grant will allow the Savannah Business Group to implement the strategies.
“Supporting and nurturing businesses to engage with their communities to identify and address priority local health issues is the first step in solving them,” said Dr. Reed Tuckson, a senior advisor to the United Health Foundation, in announcing the grant award.
The Savannah Business Group will target three sectors in its push to curb childhood obesity. The first is parents, who can have the most significant impact on their child’s weight through what they feed them, when they feed them and their attitudes toward playtime.
Local schools have made significant strides in promoting healthy eating and lifestyles in recent years by changing cafeteria menus, introducing gardens into the education process and promoting exercise through physical education and recess, according to the Savannah Business Group Executive Director Gary Rost.
“But more and more studies are saying school programs might not be effective without a community-wide approach, starting with the parents,” he said.
The Savannah Business Group will also focus efforts on physicians and employers. Doctors and medical facilities need to have “enough resources for parents to take their children if they need severe intervention,” Rost said. St. Joseph’s Candler already has programs in place, and Memorial Health is working with Children’s Health Care of Atlanta on its own initiative.
Employers, meanwhile, need to embrace education resources and implement or improve wellness programs, since most children are covered under the parents’ employer-provided health insurance.
“It’s a very ambitious project,” Rost said. “The whole idea is one organization can’t solve this problem. Even if we get every organization in town working on it, until we get families involved, we’re not going to have an impact. Once we get their commitment, and physicians and employers get on board with resources, we can make a change.”
ON THE WEB
Read the Savannah Business Group’s study “Childhood Obesity in Chatham County” at http://www.savannahbusinessgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/SBG-COMMUNITY-REPOT-Final-2.pdf.
