Healthy Apple Child Care Nutrition Project

Key stakeholders in San Francisco’s public health and early child education sectors, including Children’s Council (CC), designed Healthy Apple (HA) in 2012 with a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The purpose: to improve access to nutritious foods and physical activity for San Francisco children in childcare, supporting healthy development and reducing core risk factors for childhood obesity. Healthy nutrition and physical activity are undisputed, critically important dimensions of early childhood education (ECE) and have long-term benefits. HA leads innovation in the ECE field because it utilizes a proven, evidence-based intervention, shown in a study by the SF Department of Public Health to reduce BMI. Designed with collaborative input from multiple community partners, HA has ready-to-go resources, an online self-assessment tool and technical assistance in multiple languages. HA can easily be sustained by providers with long-term positive impact on kids.

Roll out to 175 childcare providers in San Francisco, benefitting 3,000 kids in their care and innumerable others who will pass through their programs in the future. HA is designed to encourage provider engagement with personalized goals and self-paced learning. Because of their investment in the program, providers develop healthy approaches to nutrition and physical activity that are maintained year after year. Over the span of each provider’s career, thousands of kids and their parents will be empowered to adopt healthy habits for life. Expand to one additional Bay Area county. Other Bay Area organizations serving childcare providers have requested technical assistance to adopt HA. Shared resources, such as multilingual materials and online self- assessment tools, increase the feasibility of successful replication. Outreach to Bay Area resource & referral agencies, public health departments and community-based organizations serving childcare sites will likely result in additional counties seeking help to replicate in their location beyond this grant period.

Vision

Growing Healthy Kids San Francisco

Healthy Apple envisions a bold, multi-sector movement to reduce child obesity and transform the health of low- income kids in San Francisco. Through a public awareness campaign to promote developing early healthy habits, and increased investment in this proven program, Healthy Apple can reach scale to ensure all kids in childcare have access to nutritious food and physical activity every day.

Children's Council of San Francisco

Healthy Apple Child Care Nutrition Project

Model and Strategy

Impact

Leadership

Sandee Blechman