Focus Areas

Healthy Workforce

Toolkits & Reports

Featured Community Resource Building Organizations

Issue Briefs

Still Bubbling Over: California Adolescents Drinking More Soda and Other Sugar-Sweetened Beverages
This policy brief examines changes in consumption of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages among youth in California.

School Wellness Policies, Yale Rudd Center For Food Policy and Obesity

Travel to School in California: Key Findings from the National Household Travel Survey
Nearly one-third of school-aged children in California walk or bicycle to school, more than twice the national average.

CDC: The Guide to Community Preventive Services
The Guide to Community Preventive Services is a free resource to help you choose programs and policies to improve health and prevent disease in your community.

How Obesity Threatens America 2013
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation focuses on the pressing health and health care issues facing our country. as the nation’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans, the Foundation works with a diverse group of organizations and individuals to identify solutions and achieve comprehensive, meaningful and timely change.

Articles & Interviews

Job Creation Benefits from Bike Lanes
There are lots of tangible benefits to bike lanes. They reduce traffic congestion, lead to better air quality and a healthier citizenry. A new study from the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute aims to add job creation to the list.

New Research on Community Gardening Reveals the Roots of Emotional and Physical Health
Remember how good it felt to get your hands in the dirt, to run through the sprinkler, and get pollen from a sweet-smelling flower on your nose? Most kids who grow up in cities today never have this experience. But the latest research aims to change all that.

Protecting Children from Harmful Food Marketing: Options for Local Government to Make a Difference
This article focuses on policy options for municipalities that are seeking ways to limit harmful food marketing at the community level.

Fact Sheets

Complete Streets: Active Transportation, Safety and Mobility for Individuals of All Ages and Abilities
The complete streets movement aims to develop an interconnected street network that is accessible and safe for users of all ages, abilities and modes of transportation.

Implementing Strong Nutrition Standards for Schools: Financial Implications
The “Implementing Strong Nutrition Standards for Schools: Financial Implications” fact sheet summarizes the existing evidence of the financial impact on schools that have implemented strong nutrition standards.

Guides

Voices for Healthy Kids: Healthy Food Financing Toolkit Healthy food financing initiatives attract investment in underserved communities by providing critical loan and grant financing. These resources help healthy food retailers overcome the higher initial barriers to entry into underserved, low-income urban and rural communities, and support renovation and expansion of existing stores so they can provide the healthy foods that communities want and need. In this kit are guides to identifying and recruiting volunteers, spreading the word online, alerting local media, holding events and meeting with state and local public officials to encourage policies that enable all communities to have access to healthy food choices at supermarkets

Active Design Guidelines: Promoting Physical Activity and Health in Design The Active Design Guidelines provides architects and urban designers with a manual of strategies for creating healthier buildings, streets, and urban spaces, based on the latest academic research and best practices in the field.

Model Design Manual for Living Streets The Model Street Design Manual was created during a 2-day writing charrette, which brought together national experts in living streets concepts.

Slowing Down Fast Food: A Policy Guide for Healthier Kids and Families The report examines four main strategies to reduce the harmful influence of fast food corporations and their impact on
children’s and community health: Advance Healthy School policies, Restrict locations of fast food corporations through zoning, limit kid-targeted marketing, Reduce public subsidies for fast food corporations.

Journal Articles

Physical Activity and Food Environments: Solutions to the Obesity Epidemic
This article is a status report on research on physical activity and food environments, and it suggests how these findings can be used to improve diet and physical activity and to control or reduce obesity.

Network for a Healthy California: Evaluation Results of Multi-level Nutrition Education through SNAP-EdThe Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior has a summer supplement entitled Network for a Healthy California: Evaluation Results of Multi-level Nutrition Education through SNAP-Ed. It describes California’s statewide social marketing campaign, funded primarily using SNAP-ed funds and run by the CA Dept of Public Health (and Sue Foerster).

Pricing and Promotion Effects on Low-Fat Vending Snack Purchases: The CHIPS Study
This study examined the effects of pricing and promotion strategies on purchases of low-fat snacks from vending machines.

Literature Review on Strategies for Healthy VendingThis literature review was compiled by the San Diego and Imperial Regional Nutrition Network

Newsletters

Salud America!: Tackling Latino Child Obesity in the Kitchen, Church & Community
Find out the latest in Latino childhood obesity policy, news and updates on Salud America!, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) network to prevent obesity among Latino kids.

Disabilities

National Center on Physical Activity and Disability
A monthly publication of the National Center on Physical Activity and Disability (NCPAD)

Reports

This report describes the expert panel process that was used to identify 24 recommended strategies for obesity prevention and a suggested measurement for each strategy that communities can use to assess performance and track progress over time.

State Initiatives Supporting Healthier Food Retail: An Overview of the National Landscape
The report provides readers with useful information about the rationale for and characteristics of healthier food retail legislation enacted in the last decade. The report also provides public health practitioners and their partners with potential action steps that can be used to inform and educate others about the benefits of improved access to fruit and vegetables and other healthier foods through Healthier Food Retail initiatives in their state. Gain insight into what’s happening around the country by reading this report and find out what legislation in your state supports a healthier food retail environment.

Strategies for Enhancing the Built Environment to Support Healthy Eating and Active Living
This report, developed by Prevention Institute, outlines a range of organizational practices and public policies being considered to improve the built environment in support of healthy eating and regular physical activity.

Why Place & Race Matter
A new report, Why Place and Race Matter, makes the undeniable case that race must be central to the decisions made by policymakers, advocates, and community leaders if we ever hope to close the racial health gap.

American Planning Association: Planning for Public Health
Report released by the American Planning Association (APA) highlights the results of a web-based survey used to identify draft and adopted comprehensive and sustainability plans that explicitly address public health.

Complete Streets: Best Policy and Implementation Best Practices
This Planners Advisory Service report, a joint project of the American Planning Association and the National Complete Streets Coalition, draws on lessons learned from 30 communities across the country. The report provides insight into successful strategies and practices to create complete streets, including how to build support for complete streets, adopt policies, and integrate the policy into everyday practice.

Making the Case to Stakeholders: Linking Policy and Environmental Strategies to Health Outcomes
This guide was designed to assist communities to better understand potential outcomes of the policy and environmental change objectives targeting healthy eating and active living.

National Association of City and Transportation Officials: Urban Bikeway Design Guide
Report by the National Association of City and Transportation Officials (NACTO) offers substantive guidance for cities seeking to improve bicycle transportation where competing demands for the use of the right of way presents unique challenges..

Transportation and Health: Policy Interventions for Safer, Healthier People and Communities
Partnership for Prevention collaborated with the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) at UC Berkeley, Booz Allen Hamilton, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to produce this report examining the effects of transportation policies on public health in three key areas—environment and environmental public health, community design and active transportation, and motor vehicle-related injuries and fatalities.

Research

Do All Children Have Places to be Active?
This synthesis examines the growing body of evidence indicating that racial and ethnic minority, and lower-income, communities do not provide as many built and social environmental supports for physical activity.

Tools

CDC’s CHANGE Tool – Healthy Communities Program
The CHANGE tool helps community teams (such as coalitions) develop their community action plan. This tool walks community team members through the assessment process and helps define and prioritize possible areas of improvement.

Checklist: How Bikeable is Your Community?

Transportation Health Impact Assessment Toolkit
The Transportation HIA Toolkit provides a framework for public health departments, city planners, project managers, and other stakeholders to conduct HIAs on proposed transportation projects, plans, and policies.

Walk Friendly Communities: Assessment Tool
The Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center (PBIC) has released an updated community assessment tool for the Walk Friendly Communities (WFC) program.

Webinars

Preemption and Public Health
NPLAN, in collaboration with the Public Health Law Center, hosted a webinar to train public health professionals on preemption concepts. NPLAN has developed several resources that provide public health professionals with the basics of preemption.

Videos

The Obesity Epidemic (produced by CDC)
This video explains the many factors that have contributed to the obesity epidemic, and showcases several community initiatives taking place to prevent and reduce obesity.

Source: Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities