Raising a healthier generation of children will require engaging in sustained and significant dialogue with states, communities, and the non-profit and private sectors.  To support this effort, several foundations are helping to organize and fund a new foundation as an extension of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” nationwide campaign. The newly created Partnership for a Healthier America will be dedicated to the addressing America’s obesity epidemic.  

This new organization will serve as a nonpartisan convener across the private, non-profit and public sectors to accelerate existing efforts addressing childhood obesity and to facilitate commitments towards the national target of solving childhood obesity within a generation. Mrs. Obama will serve as the honorary chair to the advisory group and, to promote bipartisanship, one Democrat and one Republican Honorary Vice Chair will serve with her–these individuals will be announced shortly.

The Partnership for a Healthier America emerged out of a series of conversations between The California Endowment, Kaiser Permanente, Nemours, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. The Brookings Institution and Sonnenchein, Nath and Rosenthal, LLP have also joined to provide independent thought leadership and operational support for the Foundation’s start-up and development. These institutions have made a lasting commitment to provide strategic guidance and expertise and to help fund and support the Foundation’s creation and operations.

Visit the website to learn more about The Partnership for a Healthier America.

It was announced that the Wallace Center recently launched the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center (HUFED). The Wallace HUFED Center, supported by a grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, was created to respond to the growing need to reorganize, rethink and transform the way food is grown, sourced, distributed, marketed and consumed in the United States in order to better meet the need of historically underserved communities. The Center will specifically focus on the need to make healthier and more affordable food available in low-income areas; to increase market access for small and mid-sized agricultural producers; and to promote positive economic activities generated by attracting healthy food enterprises into underserved communities.

The Wallace HUFED Center will apply market-based solutions with a business orientation to the problem of food access by providing technical and financial assistance to enterprising and innovative projects that directly address and resolve food access issues. Through grants, technical assistance and other activities, the Wallace HUFED Center will seek to build local capacity to serve food needs in urban and rural low-income, historically excluded and underserved communities and communities of color.

The grant program has officially opened and is issuing a call for Letters of Interest (LOI). Grants will range from one year $10,000-$25,000 grants to three year grants up to $100,000. Technical assistance will also be available to successful grantees. The Center anticipates supporting approximately 30 projects over the next three years and expects to fund a range of strategies and organizations ranging from for-profits to not-for profits. LOIs should be brief but carefully thought out concept papers that provide their technical review panel sufficient information. More…