1. Make That Behavioral Change – it’s my hope, armed with information that reinforces the importance of healthy choices, that people and communities better define an accessible form of health for themselves, and determine how they can make discernable and rewarding healthy lifestyle improvements. Let’s not get tripped up in the details of how many calories consumed and expended, let’s focus upon what the end benefits will be for those choices. It might be keeping up with your friends and children, or it might be something as pragmatic as reducing your health care costs; it doesn’t matter, it has to be something that is deeply meaningful and important to that individual. As Marni Jameson, Your Health writer for the Orlando Sentinel puts it; “mindfulness must become the new mantra if Americans are going to override the many forces standing between them and their healthier, trimmer selves.”

2. Make A Healthy Lifestyle the Norm (and not just an isolated case) – with this as a guiding principle, communities, businesses, and individuals can align their activities around this principle in all that they do and create. From our food supply to community planning, from transportation to our education system, our vision of a healthy lifestyle for all should affect every element of our lives and society. As our current state of unhealthiness has taken us decades to create, it will surely take us years to readjust to this new paradigm, but we must start that process, and muster all of the resources required to measure progress and fulfill that vision over time. Through their actions, many communities here in the U.S. and elsewhere are making progress; modeling these communities and mining their successes for local application just makes sense.

3. Make Physical Education A Mandate In Our School Systems – interview anyone who as an adult is pursuing a healthy lifestyle, and more often than not, their first experience with the benefits of exercise and movement (let alone an appreciation for their own body) was from a school P.E. class. And yet, although a large majority of states mandate physical education in schools, most do not require a specific amount of instructional time for the subject, and more than half allow exemptions, waivers, and/or substitutions for students to skip P.E. all together. “These ‘loopholes’ continue to reduce the effectiveness of the mandate,” says a recent report by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education and the American Heart Association. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends that children and adolescents do one hour or more of physical activity each day. However, according to data from the 2009 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, less than one in four high-school students do so.

I offer these, not as an over-simplication of the issues at hand, but more so for what I view as three important, all be critical elements in creating healthier lifestyles for all. What does your vision for a Healthy Lifestyle look like? I’d truly like to know. Write me at Ed@HealthyLivingMarketing.com.

The California Endowment Coachella Valley Health Initiative

A tobacco prevention summit for youth leadership is on the calendar for South Sacramento, and a community forum hosted by the Coachella Valley Health Initiative will be held in Coachella. Both are part of the program for The California Endowment. The California Endowment is a statewide, private foundation aiming for healthier communities and greater access to health care. Their mission is certainly far-reaching in purpose and geographically, but this organization is using a wide variety of approaches to affect as many people as possible, many of which include face-to-face forums and discussions. Of course, it is up to each individual to decide that they want to be a part of the healthy living discussion. The California Endowment is providing the programming and resources to encourage individuals to do just that.

Food Bank for New York City CookShop Program

The Food Bank for New York City is using the hands-on approach to steer low-income families toward better nutrition.Their CookShop program teaches children and adults how to cook, shop for healthy items on a budget, and enjoy healthier foods. Schools sign up for the program for their students, and parents then have the opportunity to participate in a class additional to those aimed at children. With this program, families gain the hands-on experience of preparing healthy meals and making better choices while shopping, tools that may greatly affect their future choices. It seems that programs of this sort can be very effective in the long term, as they put the message into action.

Atlanta Local Food Initiative (ALFI)

Community gardens are part of the plan for the Atlanta Local Food Initiative (ALFI). ALFI’s strategy to promote local,sustainable food in Atlanta covers everything from policy initiatives to Farm-to-School programs. But this organization recognizes that the community must be active and included in order for their message to be successful, and that big change often starts on a small scale. Community gardens are a way to enable participation in the local food movement from those who might not otherwise be involved.

While corporate programs, legislation, regulation, and media attention can go a long way toward enabling and encouraging healthy lifestyles for Americans, the path to healthy living must actively involve those who ultimately make the choice to change their nutrition habits or exercise more or give up unhealthy habits. Thankfully many organizations are taking note of the need for community programs and local action, while still holding on to their large-scale goals and initiatives. It is encouraging to see such a wide array of approaches to hands-on efforts for healthy living, many of which are tailored to what works best for each community or for each specific goal.

If you would like to learn more about creative collaboration possibilities that include an enduring and distinctive social purpose for your company, please contact Healthy Living Marketing at (301) 378-0384.

Reduce Obesity to Reduce Health Care Cost

The effort to reduce obesity is often framed in large-scale economic terms. Reducing obesity will reduce the instances of preventable disease and will therefore reduce the costs of health care. This now-familiar refrain is certainly true and a very important reason to combat obesity, but it may do little to inspire a person to eat healthier, exercise more and take control of their weight. What is missing with this message is the sense of urgency for individuals to act. Without individual action, obesity is a growing problem without a solution.

Creative Efforts To Reduce Obesity

Many cities around the country are taking part in creative efforts to reduce obesity; municipalities are instituting taxing soda and candy, creating increased active recreational alternatives, and funding public informational campaigns. While this creative thinking is a step in the right direction, no matter how much funding goes into decreasing obesity in America, it’s up to the individual to actively participate. So far it’s clear from the statistics that many individuals are not taking personal responsibility to decrease obesity.

One city that is on the right track with inspiring individuals is Oklahoma City. Their OKC Million campaign, with a goal of one million lost pounds for city residents, uses a community approach to encourage concrete action. The OKC Million website urges both individuals and groups – families, companies and organizations – to participate in the challenge and rightly states that everyone, whether overweight or not, can and should make their lives healthier. To date OKC Million has 42,275 participants with 577,883 pounds lost. With healthy recipes, tips for exercise, and local success stories, including that of the leading-by-example Mayor, Oklahoma City seems to have a good grasp of what it takes to both help and motivate its residents toward sustained healthy living.

We need more partnerships like OKC Million, between government, companies and the community, to effectively change the direction of obesity in the United States. These partnerships can help instill the senses of urgency and individual responsibility that may be currently missing in the national dialogue. Without more good examples, the trends will continue and the obesity epidemic will only prove more difficult to reverse.

If you would like to learn more about creative collaboration possibilities that include an enduring and distinctive social purpose for your company, please contact Healthy Living Marketing at (301) 378-0384.

Working Together For Positive Social Change

According to a recent study commissioned by Edelman PR, a majority of people desires to actively work together with businesses, brands and government to create enduring positive social change. Take for instance the recent BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  While BP and the federal government are at work attempting to cap the well, literally an army of possible solution providers has come forward to pitch ideas and concepts to aggressively rid Gulf and shoreline of oil. As of the date of this blog entry, as many as eight thousand individuals and organizations have come forward with proposed solutions. Many of us know of the recommendations proposed by celebrities like James Cameron and Kevin Costner, but few know of proposals like the SQUID device. Regardless of the end outcome and solutions for the BP oil spill disaster, crowd sourcing is an unprecedented development that taps in to the collective genius of people.

Community Projects

Another example of crowd sourcing for positive social change is from Healthy Living Marketing client, Pepsi, and the brand’s Refresh Project. Pepsi is spending a reported $ 20 million in 2010 to fund local community projects created and voted on by the public. According to Dori Molitor of WomanWise, the Pepsi Refresh Project is a fine example of not only connecting with the brand’s “consumers as individuals, but also as communities who work together to make the world a better place.” Molitor refers to this as “me, we, higher purpose”. According to Bonin Bough with Pepsi, the Refresh Project goes far beyond social media and is “about building a social engagement platform that can take the brand beyond one that you know and love to being the brand that is aligned with your passions and enabling you to move the world forward. It’s not only funding passions and projects, the Project has created a forum where people are coming together, sharing ideas and letting their voices be heard on a broader platform.” To date, the Project’s website, RefreshEverything.com has generated more than three million unique visitors, one million registrations, and more than five million votes since the program’s launch in late January 2010.

What other problems can crowd sourcing help solve in the immediate future, where many potential assets go unutilized? One could be the redistribution of 95 billion tons of food wasted each year in the U.S. to help feed the hungry and malnourished. Another could be the continued deterioration of the U.S. education system.

If you would like to learn more about Healthy Living Marketing and Web 2.0 technologies made available for brand equity enhancements, please contact us at (301) 378-0384.

Discovering that the Atlanta Convention & Visitors Bureau had lost a competitive bid to Orlando for a conference because Atlanta didn’t have an environmental program in place, business leaders and residents several years ago decided to embrace environmental sustainability as a core practice in their planning and programming. This commitment eventually organized around a new initiative, The Zero Waste Zone (ZWZ) in downtown Atlanta. Affiliated with Atlanta Recycles, the ZWZ is managed in partnership with the Green Foodservice Alliance. The Green Foodservice Alliance educates restaurant owners and foodservice operators on how they can increase their energy efficiency, reduce/divert waste and incorporate the use of natural, non-toxic cleaning and sanitation supplies. It also provides a forum where stakeholders come together to discuss a more sustainable foodservice industry.

The geographic area of the ZWZ is the downtown Atlanta convention district where a tremendous amount of waste is sent to landfills that could otherwise be recycled. The charter participants within ZWZ represent the largest foodservice operators in the area, and include convention facilities, event and entertainment venues, hotels and restaurants.

ZWZ participants pledge to comply with the following criteria:

1. Recycling of common recyclables (paper, cardboard, metals, glass and plastics)
2. Recycling of spent grease (from kitchen fryers) to be used in the local production of bio-fuel.
3. Donation of excess edible food in compliance with the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act to organizations that feed the hungry.
4. Composting of food residuals (organic food waste).

The goal of the Zero Waste Zone is to decrease the amount of waste going to landfills and to increase the beneficial use of things that otherwise may be thrown away.

Beyond being able to now cater to the increased demands from conference and meeting planners, the organizers of the Atlanta ZWZ have good cause to embrace sustainability and most especially diversion of food waste. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the amount of food waste generated in the US is huge, with Americans throwing out 96 Billion pounds each year or roughly 25% of the total food prepared. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the nation spends about one billion dollars a year to dispose of food waste.

After paper and yard waste, food waste is the third largest element (approx. 13%) of the total municipal solid waste (MSW) generated in America. The decomposition of food and other organic waste materials under anaerobic (without oxygen) conditions in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas (GHG) 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Landfills are the largest human-related source of methane in the United States, accounting for 34 percent of all methane emissions.

Fifth Group Restaurants Commitment to Environmental Sustainability

One of the participants in the program is Fifth Group Restaurants, an operator of six unique dining outlets, all located in central Atlanta. Since its establishment in 1993, Fifth Group has maintained a legacy of commitment to its employees, customers, community and the environment.

Some time ago, the company banned the use of trans fat in preparation of its food in all six of its restaurants. According to Fifth Group Restaurants Partner Robby Kukler, “As a restaurant company, we believe in offering guests the foods they want without sacrificing taste, but we also believe in offering healthy options for our patrons.” “Trans fats do not benefit the taste, texture or quality of food in any way, and so now when customers dine at a Fifth Group Restaurant, they can focus on enjoying the meal instead of worrying about harmful trans fats.”

And the credentials keep coming with the Atlanta Business Chronicle recently citing Fifth Group Restaurants as one of the best places to work in Atlanta.

But it is in the area of environmental sustainability where Fifth Group shines. Healthy Living Marketing recently caught up with one of Fifth Group’s owners, Steve Simon, at a Zero Waste planning meeting in our hometown of Frederick, Maryland. Steve was asked to speak to business and government leaders as well as restaurant operators on how Fifth Group has integrated sustainable principles in their units.

Highlights of their sustainability program include:

1. Fifth Group recycles and composts at least 95% of product that comes through their doors, resulting in 500,000 lbs. of waste being diverted from landfills annually. Composting is now coming back to the restaurants for use in Fifth Group’s roof-top garden. The homegrown vegetables and herbs make it directly back to customers through dishes on the menu, completely closing the recycling loop.

2. In May 2009, Fifth Group’s restaurant Ecco became the first restaurant in the state of Georgia to operate without a dumpster. Currently, four of their units now operate without trash dumpsters as they’ve been able to successfully divert all waste to recycling and composting. Future plans call for all six units to be dumpster free.

3. Fifth Group converts all of its “spent grease” to bio-diesel.

4. Fifth Group’s catering company, Bold American Company, recycles everything, with the exception of food waste (which is very challenging given the mobile nature of the catering operation).

And the best news for Fifth Group’s owners – all of these activities are “cost neutral”.

If you would like to learn more about Healthy Living Marketing, and social responsibility and sustainability campaign development, please contact us at (301) 378-0384.

In 1953, Detroit’s population was 2 million, the majority white. Thirty seven years later, the city counts less than 900,000, the majority black. Says Grace Lee Boggs of The Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, “we needed a new kind of city where citizens take responsibility for their decisions for improved health and sustainability instead of leaving them to politicians or the marketplace”.

Responsible Leadership – From The Bottom Up

As a result, a number of grass root organizations have formed over the years to take action on creating a healthier environment for residents, young and old. One of these organizations is Detroit Summer, a multi-racial, inter-generational collective which works to transform the community by confronting the problems they face through creativity and critical thinking. Detroit Summer currently organizes youth-led media arts projects and community-wide potlucks, speak-outs and parties.

Another community organization making a change towards health is Earthworks, a program of the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, a human service organization of caring people inspired by the spirit of St. Francis and sponsored by the Capuchins of the Province of St. Joseph and concerned benefactors. Earthworks seeks to promote sustainable agricultural practices, nutrition and care for the Earth through the creation and sustenance of urban farms within the city of Detroit. Named one of the Top 10 urban farms by Natural Home magazine in 2009, 80 percent of the vegetables, fruit it produces are used by the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. The farm also supplies Gleaners Food Bank and sells produce at local markets.

Currently, there are more than 150 community gardens in Detroit. According to Ashley Atkinson of the Garden Resource Product Collective, there are some 600 family, community and school gardens (in addition to the countless individual backyard gardens) in the city, with 8,000 adults and children working them. “They’re improving every neighborhood in the city,” she said. “If you look at a map, they are in every neighborhood. They’re having an impact at all levels.”

Detroit: City Of Hope

In 2007, the Detroit: City of Hope campaign was launched to identify, encourage and promote infrastructure-building initiatives that include:

• Expansion of urban agriculture and small businesses to create a sustainable local economy.
• Reinvention of work so that it is not simply done for a paycheck but to develop people and build community.
• Reinvention of education to include children in activities that transform themselves and their environment.
• Creation of co-ops to produce local goods for local needs.
• Replacing punitive justice with restorative justice programs to keep nonviolent offenders out of prison.

Detroit – Ground Zero For The Sustainability Movement

The people are re-imagining their city in fresh and courageous ways and there is a lot to learn from them.

Ron Williams of AlterNet writes –

Do not underestimate the capacity of this city to achieve great things. I would argue that Detroit not only still matters, but it is at this moment the single most important city in North America. Detroit is coming to a neighborhood near you-it is an early warning of what urban communities across the US and far beyond are facing as those post-industrial, peak oil hurricane winds gather strength. Nowhere else are the opportunities to re-invent, re-think, re-build and re-imagine a major American city greater than Detroit today. With the city’s current leadership hypnotized by what they see as a civic death spiral, new leadership is coming from the place it always does in the end-from the bottom up. This new life cycle is a grassroots affair with an astonishing number of people fashioning solutions and affirming. There are now eight hundred community gardens on abandoned lots, peace zones for public safety, green retrofitting of empty houses, new open source media projects and an exploding hip hop and poetry scene.

This June, as many as 10,000 people from around the world will be convening in Detroit for the US Social Forum. They are organizing around the statement: “Another Detroit is Happening.” and have chosen the city because it is ground zero in today’s global financial meltdown.

As writer Rebecca Solnit said in the July 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, “Detroit is where change is most urgent and therefore most viable. The rest of us will get there later, when necessity drives us too, and by that time Detroit may be the shining example we can look to—the post-industrial green city that was once the steel-gray capital of Fordist manufacturing.”

If you would like to learn more about Healthy Living Marketing and social responsibility campaign development, please contact us at (301) 378-0384.

Beginning in October 2009, the District has imposed a $ 0.05 fee for plastic shopping bags provided at retail. The goal is not to raise revenue per se, but to reduce the number of discarded shopping bags that go into the Anacostia. Before the tax was imposed, 47% of the trash found in the Anacostia came from plastic shopping bags.

Needless to say, the $ 0.05 fee is having a big impact. Managers at D.C. stores that sell food or beverages say the effect has been dramatic with many reporting 50% or more reductions. One Safeway store in the city’s Northwest area reports a falloff of more than 6,000 bags a week, about half of its former volume. Since the program’s inception, the number of plastic bags handed out by supermarkets and other establishments has dropped from the 2009 monthly average of 22.5million to just 3 million this past January. Clearly, the fee has succeeded in reducing plastic waste and, better yet, generated $150,000 for the clean up of the Anacostia.

We first learned of the Anacostia and the struggles that the watershed had when we began working with Friends of Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens on behalf of our client, PepsiCo. The organization is a group of concerned area citizens who work to protect and restore wetlands along the river. Given the tidal flow of the Anacostia, and its urban location just two miles from the U.S. Capitol, the area has been described by some as the “toilet bowl” of the District.

D.C. joins other large cities across North America who are learning tolive without plastic shopping bags. In support of Toronto’s goal to achieve 70 per cent waste diversion from landfill, retailers in the City of Toronto are required to charge a minimum of five cents per plastic shopping bag requested by the customer at checkout beginning last June 1. San Francisco has skipped the per-bag fee and has banned plastic bags all together. Los Angeles followed their lead, first imposing a $ 0.25 fee per bag for customers, and then approving a total ban that will go into effect in July 2010. Of the 25 cents assessed per bag, 7 cents go to stores and 18 cents goes to fund recycling and anti-pollution programs in the State of California.

Plastic bags are recycled at less than 33% the rate of paper bags, and make up the largest source of litter in our oceans, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

If you would like to learn more about Healthy Living Marketing and social responsibility campaign development, please contact us at (301) 378-0384.

It turns out that every year, 58 billion paper cups are used in the U.S. at restaurants, events and homes – many of which individually are attributable to one of the over 11,000 Starbucks stores located in the U.S.

To understand the magnitude of the problem, according to Global Green USA, if all paper cups in the U.S. were recycled, 645,000 tons of waste would be diverted from landfills each year, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2.5 million mtCO2e, equivalent to removing 450,000 passenger cars from the road.

Starbucks Recycling Challenge

Starbucks has acknowledged the problem and is now sponsoring a crowd-sourcing activity (called the Betacup Challenge) with a reward of $ 20,000 to the winning solution who can redesign the popular to-go cup. Starbucks also conducted a pilot program in New York City in Fall 2009 in seven stores to test the collection and recycling of coffee cups when combined with old corrugated cardboard (OCC), the most extensively recycled material in the United States. With Starbucks’s publicly-stated goal of having 100% of Starbucks cups either being be reusable or recyclable by 2015, there’s a lot on the line for this socially responsible business.

Betacup from the betacup on Vimeo.

If you would like to learn more about Healthy Living Marketing and social responsibility campaign development, please contact us at (301) 378-0384.

From the moment you first arrive in to Denver International Airport, it’s clear that the city’s efforts are deep and far-reaching. A few of the facility’s accomplishments include:

• implementation of a program that has led to a 75% reduction in generation of hazardous waste and a 5% annual reduction in solid waste
• 65% of the airport vehicle fleet is powered with alternative fuels;
• the installation of a 2 mega-watt solar array facility that generates more than 3.5 million kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.

Sustainable Development And Ecologically-Friendly Practices

Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper has led an effort in urban sustainability, culminating in the development of GreenPrint Denver – a long-term, citywide initiative to promote the importance of sustainable development and ecologically-friendly practices.
Many of us became aware of Denver’s approach to sustainable living and governing from our experience at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. It was then that we saw Denver’s master plan revealed for transportation, energy and water conservation, solid waste removal and many other tenets of preserving a quality life style. It was also there were we learned of Denver’s Bike Sharing Program which will be officially launched in Spring 2010, allowing residents and visitors alike to check out 600 bicycles from forty docking stations placed strategically around the city.

Healthy Community Programs

Users of the healthy community bike-sharing program will be able to use a credit card to check out a bike from an automated station at a rate of $2.99 an hour. A system of graduated fees will go up after the first 90 minutes as an incentive to return them at a check-in station. “We want the Public to use it for short trips,” says Steve Sander, Strategic Marketing Director for the city. “The whole point is to keep the bikes in use.” The Bike Sharing Program will also offer $50-per-month year memberships, which will allow for unlimited bike usage for trips less than thirty minutes. The goal is to have bicycling comprise 20 percent of all work commutes in Denver by 2016

Internationally, bike sharing programs are becoming much commonplace with cities like London, Paris, Barcelona and Amsterdam creating networks with as many as 6,000 bikes and 300 docking stations. Paris alone provides more than 10,000 bikes at 750 stations.

While Denver planners are still working to determine the locations of the forty “bike stations” where users can check out and drop off the bikes, they are looking for spots that are natural bike-travel destinations, such as transit stops, shopping corridors and workplaces. Sander says that the healthy community program also plans to locate stations in areas of dense residential centers like Capitol Hill, Five Points and the Highlands neighborhoods. He estimates the total initial cost of the non-profit program at $1.7 million, of which $1.3 million has already been raised through grants and donations. It’s will cost approximately $1.5 million a year to run the program. But with user and member fees, grants and sponsorships of bike stations, he believes that the bike-share could bring in at least $1.53 million in annual revenues.

If you would like to learn more about Healthy Living Marketing and social responsibility campaign development, please contact us at (301) 378-0384.