Dear Healthy Futures Supporter, We need your help. If you support the Healthy Future’s mission to empower Alaska’s youth building the daily habit of physical activity I urge you to contact members of the Senate Finance Committee and ask them to assure that the funding for the Play Every Day communication campaign stays in the budget. The House Finance Committee voted to effectively kill this successful program by agreeing to a $720,000 cut. That is nearly the entire current Play Every Day budget. In fact, the Play Every Day budget for FY15 is less than $500,000 so a cut of this magnitude would not only erase Play Every Day but would extend to State funding for the Healthy Futures program. We need the money to stay in the Senate budget or the damage to a wildly successful program will be irreparable. Please email or call your legislator and members of the Senate Finance Committee. CO-CHAIR: [email protected] CO-CHAIR: [email protected] VICE-CHAIR: [email protected] MEMBER: [email protected] MEMBER: [email protected] MEMBER: [email protected] MEMBER: [email protected] Why the program is valuable: In large part to the Play Every Day campaign, the Healthy Futures program has been able to expand from Ketchikan to Kaktovik and gain some real traction in addressing the childhood obesity problem we have in Alaska. The Play Every Day communication campaign has been delivering a simple but critical message the past three years: Physical activity is important and it is fun. The Center for Disease Control recommends community-wide campaigns have two key ingredients: 1) A public education campaign--Play Every Day is the public education campaign. 2) And an on-the-ground program that supports that message. Healthy Futures is the on-the-ground program that provides Alaska children a fun, free and easy way to be physically active. Without both, obesity prevalence grows and that will cost Alaskans millions of dollars in health care costs. When Play Every Day began supporting the Healthy Futures Challenge in the spring of 2012, we had less than 30 schools and 3,000 K-6th grade students participating statewide. Today we have over 160 schools and 15,500 signed up. Play Every Day is so much more than “TV ads.” The campaign has supported the Healthy Futures program by: • Educating the public about the health risks of childhood obesity and motivating them to change their behavior. If you don’t know it’s a risk, you don’t fix it. • Driving parents, teachers, and kids to participate in the Healthy Futures Challenge • Inspiring parents and their kids to be active 60 minutes every day. If families know what the target is for good health, they are more likely to try and meet it. • Conducting research through focus groups to better understand what parents think, feel, and know so that the Healthy Futures message resonates with parents and motivates them to increase physical activity and participate in the Healthy Futures challenge. • Conducting research to determine if Healthy Futures is making a meaningful difference. How will we know if kids are being more active unless there is a way to measure it? The reality is this: Healthy Futures is part of a team. If Play Every Day goes away, the Healthy Futures (a small private non-profit) will not have the human or financial resources to grow or sustain the momentum we have gathered in addressing childhood obesity. Please contact me at [email protected] if you have any questions. Sincerely, Harlow Robinson Executive Director Healthy Futures Alaska Sports Hall of Fame
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:32:21 +0000
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