A recent epidemic going around the country that has been put on the backburner since the swineflu has come out is Obesity. More specifically child hood obesity. The community that my friend and I are focusing on right now is all of the elementary schools in the Mount Vernon Area

The Mount Vernon Health Improvement Program (HIP) is aimed at fighting childhood obesity. Obese children are many times more likely to become obese adults. Also studies show that children that are obeses tend to have many more problems such as diabeties, heart attacks, high blood pressure, etc.

We have met with the principals of all the elementary schools that feed into our highschool and have started setting up running clubs/athletic groups. However in order to start these clubs you need volunteers to come and monitor the kids witha a ratio of at leat one adult for every 20 kids. In areas in which parents are mainly at work and do not have the time to volunteer this is especially difficult to accomplish. Therefore we also have enlited the help of different sport teams at our school to send players to teach the kids how to stretch, run properly, etc. After the running clubs/ track teams have been established at all of the schools then we will have to go to them make sure that all of the kids have proper paper work in and that there are the right number of supervisors always on hand. After this we will have at least twice a year a track meet at our local high school and have all of the schools come. There the students can show off all of the hard work they have done. We also are looking for suport in our local community for organizations to either donate money or items such as t-shirts or medals for the kids that win an event. We were able to last year out of the seven schools have two of the schools come out and compete and this year we plan to have them all. Further on in the future we plan to expand the program to include other schools as well and possibly have different school districts compete against one another.

Volunteer to help coach one of the teams. Donate