District leaders working together, implementing action plan to make D.C. a healthier place to live, work, learn and play 

More than 100 local government leaders, local stakeholders and public health experts from across the country met on May 10 and 11 to examine strategies aimed at reducing the high obesity rates in the District of Columbia (D.C.).

The meeting, hosted by Leadership for Healthy Communities (LHC), a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, encouraged D.C. government leaders and stakeholders to coordinate across agencies and departments to ensure the successful implementation of the District-wide obesity prevention plan. Entitled “Healthy Eating, Active Living D.C. 2010: Implementing Citywide Policies to Prevent Obesity,” the goal of the meeting was to engage the relevant stakeholders, including public health, transportation, planning, parks and recreation and education, and to provide them with key information necessary for making informed policy decisions around childhood obesity prevention.

Although the District has already started to implement tough measures, D.C. government and non-government participants alike, including advocates, were focused on taking further action to implement policies to make healthy foods more available and places for physical activity safer and more abundant in all parts of the city.

“There are significant disparities in obesity rates in different parts of the city,” said Pierre Vigilance, M.D., M.P.H., director of the District of Columbia Department of Health.  The District struggles with unequal access to factors that make it easier to stay healthy, Vigilance said. For example, some District neighborhoods have lots of grocery stores and walking paths and in others, residents must shop in stores that sell mostly snacks or fast food that can lead to unhealthy weight gain.

The week prior to the meeting, the District of Columbia released their first comprehensive report looking at obesity in D.C. and its contributing factors.  At the same time, they also released the District of Columbia Overweight and Obesity Action Plan, a five-year strategic plan to reduce the rate of overweight and obesity in the city developed under the leadership of the Department of Health with input from over 100 local advocates.  Task force sessions at the meeting focused on putting this plan into action.  Task force participants developed policy implementation plans for four areas: ensuring safe places for play and physical activity; promoting healthy school environments; promoting access to healthy, affordable foods and beverages; and creating a healthy, active built environment.

Other sessions at the meeting focused on what D.C. is already doing to increase opportunities for healthy eating and active living.  For example, the District is actively taking steps to fix aspects of the environment that make some neighborhoods unhealthy, like a lack of grocery stores or safe places to walk, noted Harriet Tregoning, director of the District’s Office of Planning. She says the District also has made it easier for people to travel around town on foot or on bicycle by installing bike lanes and walking paths.

“The more we connect the city, the more we make the healthy choice easy,” Tregoning said.

District officials and local stakeholders at the LHC meeting also got briefings on anti-obesity efforts happening in other cities, such as New York, Los Angeles and Somerville, Mass.

The LHC meeting convened just as the District moved to adopt some of the strictest exercise and nutrition standards for schoolchildren in the nation. The standards would require that District schools serve healthier foods, including fruits, vegetables and whole grains to an estimated 71,000 students. They would also triple the time that D.C. students spend on physical activity. We are “all united in a single objective and that is to get our communities and our children healthy,” said D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh, the lead sponsor of the legislation, who provided a keynote address at the conference.

Dwayne Proctor, Ph.D., M.A., team lead and senior program officer for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Childhood Obesity Team, commended D.C.’s progress thus far.  “Both the D.C. Council’s passage of the Healthy Schools Act and the District Health Department’s release of its obesity report and obesity action plan are testament to the committed leadership in this city,” he said.

Howard Koh, assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, also commended the District for taking an aggressive stance on preventing obesity.  He noted that the United States now has an estimated 23 million children who are overweight or obese and the only way to prevent more children from gaining too much weight is by taking action close to home. “If we are going to make progress, we are going to have to start with our own city,” Koh said. “All of you here today are off to a great start.”

By the end of the LHC meeting, participants were excited about moving forward with the implementation of D.C.’s plan.  “Getting people to eat differently . . . [and] . . . behave differently . . . may start with a conference but it doesn’t end there,” said D.C. Council Chairman Vincent Gray, who provided closing remarks for the first day of the meeting.  Plans for progress in policy implementation after the meeting included continuing to collaborate with new and existing partners and working to put the implementation plans developed by participants into practice.

During the closing session, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, Ph.D., director of Leadership for Healthy Communities, pointed out the striking similarity between D.C.’s action plan and the report released by the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity coincidentally on the second day of the LHC meeting.  “The federal government is using a similar strategy of collaborating across federal agencies for the successful implementation of policies to prevent obesity,” Rockeymoore Cummings said.  “You all are on the right track.”