Promising Strategies for Creating Healthy Eating and Active Living Environments is a newly released resource, prepared by the Prevention Institute on behalf of the Healthy Eating Active Living Convergence Partnership, to help build momentum for environmental change and policy approaches to improving health.  Promising Strategies was created with input from diverse stakeholders and constituencies representing fields such as public health, sustainable food systems, economic development, transportation, planning, climate change and others engaged in accelerating and supporting the movement for healthier communities.  The document thus delineates cross-cutting strategies that have the potential to engage diverse constituencies and address a range of issues that impact healthy eating and active living.

Promising Strategies serves as a launch pad for further discussion, a catalyst to understand how specific efforts fit into a broader picture, and identifies areas for collaboration across sectors and fields.  It can serve as a menu of options for various audiences to advance or expand environmental change and policy approaches.  The strategies highlighted in the document focus on environments such as the community, schools, workplaces, health care, government and media. Promising Strategies is available free of cost at http://www.convergencepartnership.org.

The Partnership has also released Strategies for Enhancing the Built Environment to Support Healthy Eating and Active Living.  This issue brief focuses on opportunities to support healthy eating and active living through issues related to the built environment and places a similar emphasis on cross-sectoral and environmental change approaches.

The Healthy Eating Active Living Convergence Partnership is a collaborative of funders with a shared goal of changing policies and environments to better achieve the vision of healthy people living in healthy places.

Prevention Institute is supporting the Partnership through policy research and analysis as part the Institute’s ongoing commitment to addressing health inequities and promoting a cross-disciplinary approach to establishing healthy food and physical activity environments in all communities. For more information see www.preventioninstitute.org or contact Virginia Lee.