Stanford Social Innovation Review

America’s Most Obese Areas Have A Few Things In Common

Although California is often admired for its healthy living, three of it’s cities made it to the 10 Most Obese Metro Areas list. Stockton, CA—which was also recently crowned Most Miserable US City by Forbes—has the highest obesity rate, with 34.6 percent of residents being overweight. This compares to a national average of 26.5 percent obesity, up from 25.5 percent in 2008.

Results from the Gallup poll show that regions ranking high on obesity generally rank low on healthy behavior indicators. Specifically, all of the 10 most obese metro areas (shown above) fall within the bottom two-thirds of all areas surveyed for frequent exercise. Furthermore, when they asked if people had a safe place to exercise, six of the areas came in below the national average.

In terms of eating habits, “of the 10 most obese places, seven are in the bottom two-thirds among all metro areas for reporting eating healthy “yesterday” and for fruit and vegetable consumption.” We know that eating habits develop based on food access and affordability, as well as nutrition education.

“Everyone has a role to play in this fight: the private sector, the public sector and parents must unite to combat the challenge,” said Lisa Gable, Executive Director of the The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation . In fact, the group just launched a $20 million anti-obesity campaign to encourage some of the world’s largest food makers (including Pepsi, General Mills, and Nestle) to reconsider the way they sell their products. This includes encouraging food companies to make packaging and labeling easier for consumers to manage their calorie intake while preserving or enhancing overall nutrition quality.

Interestingly enough, The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation is a partnership between these very organizations they seek to influence. More than 60 of the nation’s largest retailers, non-profit organizations, food and beverage manufacturers and trade associations are behind this effort to reduce obesity, especially childhood obesity, by 2015.

Because obesity is linked to chronic health problems like high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart attack, it becomes an economic problem, too. Lack of access to health insurance only exacerbates the problem, leaving people sick and public services stretched. (A few months ago, the New York Times shared two graphs showing national obesity rates and Medicare expenditures).

Gable describes their program to target the fitness and nutrition aspects of the problem: “We are supporting physical and nutrition education in schools, promoting workplace wellness within our organizations, and making more healthy foods and beverages available to consumers in the marketplace.”

She continues, “Obesity is a serious health and economic issue for our country, one we all must work together to solve.”

Halle Tecco is a San Francisco resident and social entrepreneur passionate about technology, service and healthy living. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Yoga Bear, a non-profit providing more opportunities of health and wellness to cancer patients through the practice of yoga. Halle has worked as a Product Manager at various consumer-internet startups, including Enternships.com and Kiva.org. She also serves as an advisor to GreatNonprofits.org. She is pursuing her MBA at Harvard Business School and will graduate in 2011.

1 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

TED Prizewinner and Chef Jamie Oliver: Food Revolutionary?

It’s TED Week, when the granddaddy of social change fests meets again in California to air the latest, best and brightest ideas to help the world. This year, organizers formally awarded a young British social entrepreneur — a chef —  their prestigious TED Prize, an honor conferred annually to someone with a dream and the organizational chops to change the world, at least a bit of it.

Meeting in Long Beach, conferees gave the $100,000 prize to Jamie Oliver, a 34-year-old British chef, who told TED-goers Wednesday he will use the money to start a movement [and a social change organization] devoted to fighting childhood obesity. It’s a problem, he says, that will — for the first time in history —  give today’s children a shorter lifes-pans than their parents.

Oliver, the son of pub owners in Calvering, Essex, England, and a high school dropout who parlayed his entrepreneurial skills into a best-selling cookbook and TV show in Britain, said last night that he wished “for a complete overhaul” of the American food system, saying processed food and industrialized agriculture are giving Americans poor choices of what to eat, decreasing life spans and causing health care costs to surge out of control. “This is a global catastrophe,” he said. “It is sweeping the world —  China, India, everywhere. And in America, obesity costs Americans $150 billion per year. In 10 years, it’s set to double, and let’s be honest, guys. You can’t afford it.”

In a highly-engaging, hit speech that has been the buzz of the conference this year, Oliver said obesity doesn’t just hurt the people who are overweight, but the families and social communities around them. And the food industry, he says —  from restaurants to agribusiness —  “needs to be stopped.” Portion sizes are massive, he says, and food labeling “is a disgrace,” he said. “The industry wants to self-police themselves but how can somebody say it’s low fat when it’s filled with sugar?”

“My wish is to have a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity,” Oliver told conferees in this speech. “…England is right behind you, America. We need a revolution.”

Oliver, named to the prize weeks ago but giving his first official speeches an interviews as a prizewinner this week, says he will use his winnings to:

• Establish a good-nutrition foundation with funding, office space and facilities;
• Find partners to create a traveling food theater troupe to teach kids about better eating;
• Sign up education experts, graphic designers and writers to help him produce teaching materials that kids will use to help them eat healthier;
• Hire Web designers to create a Web site and social media campaigns to build an international movement to fight global food giants for healthier food;
• Invite corporate partners to invest in food preparation education for their customers and to help champion his movement, and
• Start an “honest food labeling” program

Oliver, who begins a program for ABC television in March called Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, first caught the eye of TED conference organizers with his “Feed Me Better” campaign in the U.K. in 2005 to improve school lunches, during which he presented a petition with more than 270,000 signatures to the prime minister’s residence calling for healthier diets for children and young adults. As a result, the British government also pledged to address the issue.

Oliver’s new TV show will follow Oliver as he visits Huntington, W. Va, as of December deemed the “unhealthiest town” in America for its high rate of food-related illnesses and deaths per capita. The show, created in reality-show style, will set out to chronicle Oliver’s efforts to educate the local population and create a movement to turn things around.

What do you think. Can one social entrepreneur build a social movement big enough to change the way a nation, much less a global population, eats? 
Let us hear from you.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

0 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Clout-Sourcing

Forget about the wisdom of crowds. For Andrew Mason, creator of The Point, it’s more about tapping into their clout.

Want to stage a quick boycott against, say, Pepsi? Or gather enough people online to buy chickens for poor women in Nicaragua? Or wait. Maybe you just want to crowdsource an audience for your favorite indie rock band—to convince it that showing up in your town would be worth the trip?

The point of The Point? To reduce the risks of collective action—like the angry backlash of an employer or an embarrassingly sparse turnout at a well-publicized rally. Mason tries to commit people before they actually have to engage. It works like a tipping point in that way: the site attempts to guarantee critical mass. “By delaying action until you know that you have all the pieces in place for the action to be successful and get the outcome you desire,” Mason told public radio earlier this year, “you’re reducing the risk of acting as a group.”

Click here for further explanation.

Mason’s site, which garnered some interest last week at the Convergence conference at the Desmond Tutu Center in Manhattan, is one of the early examples of how social media is helping people to self-assemble for social action.

So far, there have been a few dozen demonstrations, more than 50 charity fundraisers, and dozens of petition drives launched from the site. Posted today, for example, are efforts to crowdsource funding for a documentary on youth poetry in Chicago; the construction of a new animal adoption center and rescue kennel; and the rental of billboards around Lansing to support Barack Obama’s presidential bid.

Not all campaigns seek money. One calls for collective action to force Exxon to lower gas prices. (Good luck!)

Does it work? Not very often—but that’s the point, Mason says. Only those campaigns able to gather a serious, committed crowd—before they get down to work—end up progressing offline.

Click here to watch a video on Vimeo about how one woman crowdsourced action on The Point to beautify her neighborhood. Or watch this video, about one woman’s effort to organize change in her workplace.

Marcia Stepanek is Founding Editor-in-Chief and President, News and Information, for Contribute Media, a New York-based magazine, Web site, and conference series about the new people and ideas of giving. She is the publisher of Cause Global, an acclaimed new blog about the use of digital media for social change. She also serves as moderator and producer of New Conversations for Change, Contribute’s forum series highlighting social entrepreneurs and new trends in philanthropy.

1 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments

Community Advisory Committees in Health Foundations

For six years, beginning in 2000, I worked for Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, on a project that advocated for the creation of permanent community advisory committees (CACs) that health foundations would use as liaisons between their board of directors and the communities their foundations want to serve. More than 20 foundations have incorporated CACs as part of their structure.
Predecessors of mine at CU and colleagues at Community Catalyst developed the blueprint for foundation CACs, which were intended to increase the amount and quality of community engagement by the foundation and to assist with important assessments of community health needs.
Most CACs are separate from foundation governing boards. These CACs have significant community-engagement obligations, but have neither grant-making nor fiduciary duties. Without such duties, some believed CACs could turn most of their attention to community-engagement activities.
Now that foundations with CACs are maturing, it is helpful to reflect on the results of this experiment. Some CACs have disappeared because of conflicts with the board, mission confusion, absence of leadership, or lack of resources. Others are finding new ways to engage with, and represent, communities. Although it is difficult to assess precisely the success and impact of community-engagement techniques, several CACs appear to be thriving.
Preparing for the second decade of CACs, the Con Alma Health Foundation and Grantmakers In Health will be hosting a convening of CAC leaders from around the country this month. More information about the convening can be found at Grantmakers In Health. On the agenda are two major topics: strategies for effective community engagement and tools for measuring impact. Undoubtedly, these leaders will also grapple with many questions, including:

1. Should CACs be entirely separate from the governing boards? Is the inherent tension between separate CACs and governing boards helpful in advancing the mission of the foundation?
2. Should CACs be permanent? Are permanent CACs absolving boards of directors of their important community-engagement responsibilities?
3. Are CACs defining “community” properly? Are any of the ultimate intended beneficiaries of foundation grantmaking being left out under the foundation’s governing and community-engagement mechanisms?

While CACs exist primarily in health conversion foundations, lessons learned from this experiment may be helpful for other actors in the nonprofit sector, especially grant-making and grant-seeking organizations hoping to connect better with the communities they serve.

But what do you think? Are you one of those nonprofit actors, or have you had experience with a CAC? What strategies should CACs use to connect with their communities?

Scott Benbow is a philanthropy specialist in San Francisco. Since graduating from Columbia Law School, he has practiced law in the United States and in three other countries.

2 Comment(s) - View/Post Comments