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Community Grants

To achieve stated goals, The Endowment awarded funding over six years to a local collaborative in each of six communities throughout California. In each local collaborative, three entities received grants:

• Community Partners - Local community-based coalitions or collaborative groups with experience and capacity to effect change in their community in this arena are critical to the success of the program. They have mobilized and engaged community members and organizations, and serve as a springboard for community action. Kaiser Permanente, as a major partner for the overall program, is a valuable local partner in areas where they are actively engaged in obesity prevention.
• School District - As both an agent for change and an important environment for changes that improve nutrition and physical activity for children, school districts with a commitment to improving children's health and a demonstrated record of achievement in the nutrition or physical activity arena play a vital role.
• Local Public Health Department - As the government agency charged with protecting and promoting the health of the community, the local public health department is an essential partner for long-term sustainability and support efforts to link policy interventions and broader campaigns to obesity and diabetes prevention, chronic disease reduction, and to the elimination of health disparities.

Local efforts of community collaboratives include strategies that are culturally appropriate and that build cultural competence within each sector. Grantee collaboratives engage in strategic planning; assess assets and needs; identify priority issues for intervention; design and carry out interventions; and evaluate results on an ongoing basis to support or modify intervention strategies.

HEAC Phase One—Work in Five Sectors

In each HEAC site, the partners worked with other advocates to improve nutrition and physical activity environments in five sectors: schools, after school programs, neighborhoods, marketing and advertising, and health care. In schools, with technical support from California Project LEAN, HEAC partners worked to implement the new nutrition standards, improve the quality of school meal programs and increase participation, and to eliminate marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages. HEAC sites also advocated for compulsory, high quality PE at every grade level K-12, and for increased opportunities for non-competitive physical activity.

After school, HEAC partners, supported by CANFit, worked with school-based and community-based programs to adopt policies and practices that promote healthy eating and increased physical activity, and to foster cooperation with parks and recreation.

In neighborhoods, HEAC partners, with technical support from PolicyLink, worked with local businesses, elected officials, environmentalists, and other advocates to improve access to affordable fresh produce, safe walkways and parks, to improve community design, and limit promotion of unhealthy food.

In the healthcare sector, HEAC partners, with technical support from Kaiser Permanente, trained health care providers to engage in community prevention activities, and to incorporate more prevention and promotion into clinical practice.

In the marketing and advertising sector, HEAC partners worked to eliminate marketing of unhealthy products to children, and to encourage promotion of healthy nutrition and physical activity. With guidance from Berkeley Media Studies Group and others, messages, materials, and strategies were developed to push for policy change at the local, state and national levels.

Click here to download the Logic Model from HEAC Phase 1 (69k Excel Document)

HEAC Phase Two—Work in Two Sectors

After four years of working closely in five sectors, HEAC partners realized that their efforts would be more streamlined and manageable if the 5 sectors were merged into two sectors: schools/after school and neighborhoods/after school. In HEAC Phase One, the HEAC partners successfully achieved their goals in the health care sector, hence there was no need to continue to have health care as a separate sector. In HEAC Phase Two, communication and dissemination of best practices and key lessons learned at the local, state and national levels is a high priority. All activities are expected to support this objective.

Please see the Grantee Profiles to learn more about the specific changes to policies and practices each collaborative has achieved to date.

HEAC II Goals in Each Sector

1. School/After School Sector

• Full implementation of current state standards (SB12 and 965) for competitive school beverages and foods district wide, grades K through 12.
• Better quality school meals.
• Full and ongoing implementation of California's required minutes for PE. Policies and practices that support having 50% of PE/PA time spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity throughout the school day.
• Continue to implement, monitor and revise local school wellness policies to assure that all school environmental changes are sustained.
• School-based after school programs are linked with schools to create a seamless nutrition and physical activity environment.
• Food and physical activity standards are adopted by ASES/Prop 49 funded after school programs.
• Success stories and lessons learned in the school/ after school sector are shared in the media, through presentations at conferences, and with community based organizations, advocacy groups, and professional associations.
• Strategies are in place to ensure sustainability of school/after school environmental and policy change.

2. Neighborhood/After School

• Neighborhoods/communities have improved access to affordable healthy food.
• Neighborhoods/communities have improved access to physical activity opportunities.
• A broad cross-section of youth (K-12) have access to healthy "out-of-school" environments (including summer programs, local parks, league programs, faith-based programs and youth development programs).
• Accomplishments in the health care sector are sustained by linking interventions to neighborhood/community strategies.
• Success stories and lessons learned in the neighborhood sector are shared in the media, through presentations at conferences, and with community based organizations, advocacy groups and professional associations.
• Sustainability of neighborhood environmental and policy change is ensured.
• Within health departments, data capacity to support environmental approaches to improving nutrition and physical activity is developed.
• Within health departments, organizational capacity to improve nutrition and physical environments has improved.
• HEAC health departments participate in and inform statewide planning to improve local health department capacity to engage in environmental approaches to chronic disease prevention, conducted under the auspices of CCLHO/CHEAC.

Click here to download the program LOGIC MODEL for Phase II (147k PDF Document)

Click here to see the community Grantee Profiles