HWCF’s Commitment to Healthy Communities

Commitment to Healthy Communities Executive Summary
Commitment to Healthy Communities Full Anonymized Report
Commitment to Healthy Communities Infographic

The Commitment to Healthy Communities (CHC) is an initiative to catalog and assess community programs designed to prevent hunger and obesity that are funded by the food and beverage industry. Examples of such programs include: healthy active living programs, food access programs and food security programs. To implement CHC, HWCF entered into an academic research partnership with the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health.

This initiative will establish a new standard for community programs while enabling the food and beverage industry to assess the effectiveness of their efforts. To do this, CUNY School of Public Health developed common metrics for relevant community programs within a collective impact framework that included best practices for governance, program design and community engagement.

CUNY School of Public Health will provide feedback to participating companies and HWCF will identify possible partnership opportunities with other companies, NGOs and community members to further the impact of existing programs.

Results will be externally validated by CUNY School of Public Health and will document the impact of these programs, provide aggregate reporting on common metrics and provide additional information on certain individual programs. Those results will be publicly available by Q4 2016.

#HealthyCommunities
As our partner, we invite you to become a part of this very important conversation. Use the hashtag #HealthyCommunities in social communications about hunger- and obesity-related programs and help us to amplify their local impact.
Learn More.

Governance and Advice

Dr. Terry Huang, PhD, MPH, CPH, of the CUNY School of Public Health and HWCF’s Michelle Guillermin jointly direct CHC.

An independent advisory board works to ensure the credibility of the approach and published results. Additionally, we appreciate collaboration and input from our non-governmental and academic partners who are experts in the field.

Independent Advisory Board Members

  • John Cawley, PhD, Professor and Co-Director
    Cornell’s Institute on Health Economics, Health Behaviors and Disparities
  • Mary Balluff, MS, RD, LMNT, Chief, Community Health and Nutrition Services
    Douglas County Health Department
  • Ladan Manteghi, Executive Director
    Global Social Enterprise Institute at Georgetown University
  • Derek Yach, MBChB, MPH, Executive Director
    Vitality Institute for Health
  • Dr. Cedric Bryant, PhD, FACSM, Chief Science Officer
    American Council on Exercise

** This program contributes to industry goals as outlined in the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) Healthy Living and Healthy Choices Initiative.

To join this Initiative or for more information, please contact:

Alli Delano 
[email protected]