Wellness Matters! October 2021

CWN’s monthly eNewsletter, Wellness Matters! October 2021

In this issue:

  • REACH: Promising Practices Showcase
  • Healthy Food Rx: A Community Clinical Partnership
  • Supporting Breast Cancer Awareness Month
  • Steps for a Safe Halloween
  • CWN Policy Corner
  • Announcements and Upcoming Events: Join Our Team: Research and Evaluation Director, Lung Cancer Awareness Month, National Epilepsy Awareness Month, and World Pneumonia Day

Wellness Matters! September 2021

CWN’s monthly eNewsletter, Wellness Matters! September 2021

In this issue:

Healthy Retail Intervention Literature Review

A search of peer-reviewed and grey literature was conducted to summarize the evidence for retail interventions, particularly with regard to impact on purchasing behaviors among consumers. Articles were retrieved by searching the SNAP-Ed Toolkit and PubMed database to identify studies of retail interventions. Needs assessments, modeling studies, and clinical interventions were excluded from review. In addition, multiple publications for the same intervention were excluded if they did not contribute new information that was relevant to the review. The titles and abstracts of articles retrieved were reviewed to determine their relevance to the literature review. Included studies were reviewed in entirety to extract key information about the study design and outcomes, as summarized in the literature review matrix.

Read the full report describing the project: Healthy Retail Interventions: Full Literature Review

Schools for Healthy and Thriving Students: A Wellness Policy Consortium Success

To support school districts in the Central Valley of California with updating, strengthening, and developing more comprehensive Local School Wellness Policies (LSWP), Valley Children’s Healthcare, in partnership with CWN, created the Schools for Healthy and Thriving Students: A Wellness Policy Consortium (Consortium).

The Consortium is aligned with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model and engages school district leaders within Fresno and Madera counties in the Central Valley of California.

Chawanakee Unified School District (CUSD), located in Madera County, California, serves over 1,400 students, where 49% qualify for free or reduced meals through the national school lunch program. CUSD actively engaged in the Consortium which prompted them to update their LSWP.

CSUD formed a seven-person Wellness Committee that met in January of 2020 for a visioning session after reading the current policy. They used the WSCC model as their roadmap—a strategy that not all districts incorporate, yet one that demonstrates a more comprehensive approach to addressing student, employee, and community health.

The committee was divided into subcommittees to take on this comprehensive approach and ensure local information-gathering took place. The committee met twice in person before California’s statewide stay-at-homeorder was announced due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic put into sharp focus the importance of health and wellness. Moving to a virtual format due to the pandemic, several key areas of revision were identified by the committee to better support student and employee health:

  • Nutrition and Food Services
  • Physical Wellness
  • Mental Health

To learn more about CUSD’s experience, you can review their in-depth story in the Chawanakee Unified School District Case Study by clicking here: CUSD Case Study

The study presents the process leading to demonstrable changes to support healthy futures for all CUSD’s students.

To access the CUSD Health and Wellness Plan, click here.

#LetsFeedLACounty Food Voucher Program: Creating an Emergency Food Program during COVID-19

#LetsFeedLACounty topline report cover

The COVID-19 pandemic, and its economic shutdown, placed millions of Americans in financial crisis. In Los Angeles County, where 27% of lower-income households experienced food insecurity, resulting in job layoffs exacerbated an already critical situation. As a result, food insecurity skyrocketed, adding a huge new population of food insecure to the county’s ranks, many of whom did not qualify or use federal food assistance programs.

Read the full report describing the project: Topline Report

The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic shutdown placed millions of Americans in financial crisis. In Los Angeles County, over 1/3 of Los Angeles County residents reported being food insecure.

To address this crisis the Los Angeles County Food Security Branch partnered with the Public Health Institute (PHI), to assemble a cross-sector group to establish the #LetsFeedLACounty Food Voucher Program to aid County residents, including immigrant households and college students, who were at risk of hunger and exclusion from other forms of assistance. Two programs of the PHI, the Center for Wellness and Nutrition and Roots of Change, provided the leadership, program expertise, evaluation services, and fiscal management for this rapidly moving program.

This multi-faceted team of experts, including partner Wholesome Wave and 19 community-based organizations, delivered nearly $22 million in nutrition benefits in just nine weeks using the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act funding. The program enrolled about 30,000 families, reaching over 95,000 individuals during this crisis.

Access the one-pager: Creating an Emergency Feeding Program in the Midst of a Global Pandemic

Food and Nutrition security continues to impact many families across the United States, even as recovery from the pandemic has begun. Whether your local needs are big or small, emergency or prevention—we can help communities deploy strategies to increase access to healthy foods through dignity and choice. Our team of experts has national experience in implementing innovative and powerful strategies using a health equity framework.

For more information, contact Amy DeLisio.