How to Leave a Footprint in New York Communities

The 2019 Creating Healthy Schools and Communities Convening, Leaving a Footprint, Spreading Roots: Sustaining CHSC Activities into the Future, was held on September 10. Kelly Moltzen and Moria Byrne-Zaaloff from Bronx Health REACH and Claire Raffel from the Tisch Food Center at Teacher’s College met with CHSC grantees to discuss how all partners could work together to ensure that our school wellness initiatives are sustained across the state by supporting the WELL Campaign.

One of the goals of the WELL Campaign is to develop a New York State model wellness policy that can be shared with local school districts. The grantees also provided suggestions regarding what this state model should include such as: aligning systems of measuring data across federal, state and city health and education departments to achieve one collective impact; converting state data collection to an electronic system; better NY State Education Department (SED) and NYS Department of Health coordination; a state liaison in SED to support district wellness councils; more wellness tools and training for schools; and better systems for effectively monitoring all schools' successes/implementation of policies.

To lend your support for increased funding to the CHSC and WELL campaigns, please sign our petition.