Eating healthier is one of Mayor Karl Dean’s 2012 resolutions. So far, so good, he says. Though, he admits, it’s becoming more difficult as we move deeper into January.
Maintaining momentum is key to achieving any resolution, and just as Dean commits to sustaining his personal goals, he resolves to put continued emphasis on healthy living throughout Nashville this year.
He, along with other city officials, is calling for Nashvillians to do the same during NashVitality Week. The inaugural affair, which began Sunday and continues through Saturday, challenges all of Nashville to make the healthy choice the easy choice.
The week will feature three key events: the third annual Healthy Eating/Active Living (HEAL) Summit, a Youth Serving Organizations Workshop and a trio of Health Impact Assessment Workshops. Each event will include active discussion from city officials and community leaders about how to make Nashville a healthier place in 2012.
“The main thing is to keep the public galvanized and having the ambition to move Nashville and the state of Tennessee out of the bottom of the obesity rankings,” Dean says.
NashVitality Week comes at a critical time in the city’s healthy-living movement, as the $7.5 million federal stimulus grant to combat obesity through the Communities Putting Prevention to Work program is set to expire. The money was awarded in 2010 and must be spent before the end of March, though the city has submitted a proposal to extend that deadline in order to complete several initiatives, including the expansion of the bike share program, according to Dr. Bill Paul, director of the Metro Public Health Department.
In the two years since funding was received, the city has put much focus on making Nashville healthy, active and green. NashVitality Week will celebrate healthy successes with local and national leaders speaking about initiatives to increase levels of physical activity, improve nutrition and decrease tobacco use. The week’s events also will spin forward, discussing ways to harness that momentum.
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“There’s been a lot of progress with the grant and thanks to the mayor’s leadership,” Paul says. “This is an opportunity to celebrate where we are and look ahead thinking about all the things going on in Nashville and how to sustain them going forward.
“We want to figure out, ‘What are the opportunities for people to engage in helping keep Nashville moving in a healthy direction?’ ”
HEAL Summit
The first element of that discussion will take place at Wednesday’s HEAL Summit, a free event that will feature health experts giving perspective on how well-being affects Nashville and impacts communities across the country.
Rebecca Payne, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s acting director of Communities Putting Prevention to Work, will be a featured speaker. There also will be a panel of local leaders discussing community-based approaches to revitalizing civic participation in health.
“Part of becoming a healthier city is individuals making changes in their lives, but it also is organizations stepping forward and saying, ‘We are going to be a healthier organization,’ ” Paul says.
Dee Stoffer, head of health ministry at Nashville’s Christ the King Church, will be among those local panelists. Christ the King was the first parish to sign the NashVitality agreement to promote health and wellness in our community. Stoffer believes that, with more than 1,000 church families and a school that serves students in pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, the faith and educational setting is a perfect staging ground for grassroots health initiatives.
“We feel health — mental health, physical health and spiritual health — is very important,” Stoffer says. “It’s all-encompassing in healthy lifestyles.”
The church’s first movement toward implementing its pledge was to have a member of the NashVitality team assess the food in the church’s vending machines. A nutritionist in the congregation will be looking at the church’s food service offerings this week. The school teachers have formed a walking club, Pastor Dexter Sutton Brewer continues to lead a pre-existing running club, and on April 14, Christ the King will host its first health fair with body mass index measurements, weight-lifting instruction, chair massages and a host of booths from health-focused organizations.
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In addition, on Sunday Christ the King hosted its first health and wellness event, which included a presentation by a local dietitian on healthy eating choices. It was the first of what Stoffer said would be monthly wellness-related seminars.
Every time you teach somebody and they repeat that in their home environment, it builds momentum, Stoffer says. “And the more you talk about it, the more people understand that a healthy-living lifestyle can impact so many things in our lives: How much we pay for health insurance and life insurance, our sick days, how we look at things in life. It’s a great way to relieve a lot of stress.”
Getting youths involved
These messages are not just aimed at the adults in our community.
NashVitality Week also includes a workshop for youth-serving organizations. Hosted by the Metro Public Health Department, the free event will help these local institutions acquire tools to adopt healthy eating and active-living policies and create a healthier environment for Nashville’s school-age youth.
“I have teenagers,” Paul says, “and it seems like the default food and beverage doesn’t always have a choice on the healthy side. It’s not so much to make sure youth are always eating tofu, but to say, ‘While we have them, we are going to offer something that’s healthy.’ ”
The final piece of NashVitality Week is a series of health impact assessment workshops. The first takes place today; another will take place Friday and the third on Jan. 25 (registration for all three sessions is closed).
The idea behind the workshops is to teach people how to analyze potential health effects of policies, plans or projects that are developed without a specific focus on health.
For example, the Health Department recently performed a health impact assessment on its Easy Ride program, which lets workers at participating employers swipe their ID card to pay a fare, and the transit authority then bills the employer. “It sounds like a healthy thing,” Paul says, but the assessment helps indicate whether the program actually does cause less air pollution or encourage activity through people walking to the bus stop.
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The NashVitality workshops will expose community members to both the idea of a health impact assessment and the methods involved. It’s “technical assistance, training and teaching,” Paul says.
“It’s a formal way of trying to make sure the decisions we make and the projects we pursue and build are adding to health, or are at least not inadvertently negative to people’s health.”
Effort won’t stop
All of it is designed to continue Nashville’s conversation about being healthy, active and green.
Just as the city came together to walk 100 miles and complete a 5K with the mayor, it can once again come together as a community and help make each other’s healthy-living resolutions a reality. Dean believes that, by galvanizing its efforts, even when the federal funding expires the city can remain the South’s battlefield against obesity.
The greenways, community centers and bikeways give Nashville a good base to encourage people to exercise and be active, and, he says, a significant amount of the resources that supported both the 100-mile walk and the 5K were raised from the private sector in Nashville.
With infrastructure and demonstrated commitment from local funders, Dean is resolved to increase the amount of activity in which the city is encouraging its citizens to participate.
“You can’t encourage people to only walk for one year,” he says. “My intention is to only magnify our efforts.”
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