Prevention Institute provides ongoing guidance, strategy development, and policy analysis for the Healthy Eating Active Living Convergence Partnership. The Partnership is a collaborative of funders in the United States that have come together to jointly advance equity-focused efforts to create environments that support healthy eating and active living. The Partnership aims to strengthen and accelerate collaboration among practitioners, policymakers, funders, and advocates. The steering committee includes The California Endowment, Kaiser Permanente, Nemours Foundation, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the newest member, The Kresge Foundation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention serves as a critical technical advisor. PolicyLink, a national research and action Institute devoted to advancing economic and social equity, acts as program directors for the partnership.
To catalyze environmental change efforts around the country, the Partnership has commissioned comprehensive and cross-cutting reviews of policy, strategy, and program recommendations. A sampling of resources and ongoing efforts supported by the Partnership are featured here. For more information, please visit: www.convergencepartnership.org.
Current Efforts
Regional ConvergenceThe Partnership is committed to supporting funders at the regional level—in metropolitan areas, counties, states and in some cases, across multiple states—to coordinate across multiple fields and advance environmental change efforts. Expanding regional convergences is crucial to achieving the Partnership's goal of healthy people in healthy places.
Federal Transportation Policy
With the authorization of a new federal transportation bill comes the important opportunity to advance healthy places. To integrate health and equity more centrally in transportation policy, the Partnership has commissioned a set of research and policy briefs by leading health and transportation researchers and advocacy organizations. Visit the Transportation & Health Toolkit for more information.
Community Innovation Fund
Through a competitive process, the Partnership issued a call for proposals for efforts to create healthy places through land use/built environment and/or access to health food strategies. The Fund will provide matching funds to grantmakers interested in expanding their funding portfolios to include more robust environmental change programs.
Publications
Leading National Foundations and Health Care Organizations Make Unprecedented Call for Investment in Prevention. In a letter released August 17, 2009, leaders at The California Endowment, The Kresge Foundation, Nemours, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and W.K. Kellogg Foundation and a top official at Kaiser Permanente, wrote that community prevention measures like improved access to healthy food and physical activity will save both lives and money.
The Transportation Prescription: Bold New Ideas for Healthy, Equitable Transportation Reform in America, is a policy guide that analyzes the intersection of transportation, health and equity. This report features a foreword by Rep. Jim Oberstar, Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and one of the primary authors of the upcoming federal transportation bill.
Promising Strategies for Creating Healthy Eating and Active Living Environments, delineates crosscutting environmental change strategies that have the potential to engage diverse constituencies and address a diversity of issues that impact healthy eating and active living.
Recommendations for the Prevention and Wellness Funds, was developed for the Obama Administration with recommendations for investment in prevention and wellness as an element of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009.
