Worms, Bees, & Bicycles: A Lively
Neighborhood Project to Lower Obesity in Humboldt Park and Logan Square
Children
Faith in Place, a CLOCC partner since 2002, runs a youth program
called “From
the Ground
Up/De La Tierra Para Arriba” for low-income children in Logan Square
and Humboldt Park. Our
after-school program and summer camp serve 35 below-poverty-level youth
and their families.
Focusing on urban agriculture, we teach dozens of children to grow organic
food for their
families, adopt healthy diets and active lifestyles, and gain entrepreneurial
skills while marketing
homegrown products. This project will study the effectiveness of our
program in improving
children’s health, behavior, knowledge, and attitudes toward nutrition,
physical activity, and
environmental stewardship.
Specifically, we will establish baseline measures
in July 2005 of a treatment group and a control
group of children; assess the treatment children at the end of the
intensive 5-week summer camp
intervention (August 2005); and complete post-testing of both groups
at the end of the school
year (May 2006). We will partner with two bilingual students from UIC’s
Naomi Morris
Collaborative for Assessment and Evaluation to collect the data. These
students, with Faith in
Place staff, will take basic health measurements of height, weight,
waist size, blood pressure, and
BMI (using the data entry program provided by CLOCC for BMI data).
Naomi Morris staff and
students will assist children in completing the Hearts n’ Parks
child and parent survey and
Pediatric Quality of Life to survey general well-being. UIC’s
Institutional Review Board will
review and approve the research protocol to support the protection
of human subjects before data
collection will begin.
We know that “From the Ground Up” has
made a huge difference in neighborhood children’s
lives – in their self-confidence, school performance, leadership
abilities, and commitment to
environmental stewardship. We believe it has also had a positive impact
on their health,
behavior, knowledge, and attitudes toward nutrition and physical activity.
We hope this project
will yield more concrete evidence of our effectiveness, as well as
point toward possible
improvements we can make. We also believe the results will help Faith
in Place strengthen its
advocacy for sustainable agriculture. According the Prevention Institute, “Widespread
attention
to obesity and poor eating habits creates a unique opportunity to link
health concerns about food
consumption and environmental concerns about food production” (Building
Bridges: Linking
Public Health and the Sustainable Agriculture Movement). This research
study will better equip
Faith in Place to take advantage of that opportunity.
For more information
contact:
Liz Sunderland, Youth Programming Coordinator
Faith in Place
2649 N. Francisco
Chicago, IL 60647
(773) 235-4640
liz@faithinplace.org
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