health, wellness & safety

PORTFOLIO:

Childhood Health

GEOGRAPHIC IMPACT:

Chicago

ORGANIZATION:

Consortium to Lower Childhood Obesity in Chicago Children (CLOCC)

SUMMARY:

Founded in 2002, the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children is a data-driven, Chicago-wide initiative aimed at coordinating local residents working to fight obesity among the city’s children. Recognized as a model prevention effort by the Centers for Disease Control and others, the organization works with more than 3,000 individual partners from over 1,200 organizations to achieve impact, and to gather data about initiatives that are needed and initiatives that work. In 2009 and 2010, the foundation supported the development of a walkability assessment tool and training so that CLOCC and partners could systematically measure and improve the obstacles to safe walking and biking in certain low-income Chicago neighborhoods. The CLOCC Neighborhood Walkability Assessment initiative became an important foundation for a large federal grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Janece Simmons, Community Development Planner, West Humboldt Park Development Council

I work with 34 block clubs in West Humboldt Park. The walkability study and tool really helped the block clubs address safety issues that other processes didn’t. One big problem that got fixed was pedestrian lighting. There are lights on the streets, but the trees blocked them, so it was still too dark to feel safe. Another block used the assessment as the launch point for turning an abandoned lot into a community garden for edible plants. On another block, the priority was to block sidewalk access to an empty lot, so cars that parked there wouldn’t just drive over the sidewalk to get to the street. Now there are posts there and people can walk safely. Kids can ride their bikes.

Dr. Adam Becker, Executive Director, CLOCC

When you think about the complexity of a problem like obesity, citywide environmental changes have the potential to impact the greatest number of people. But often, identification of the bigger issues comes from our understanding of the challenges faced in smaller communities. For example, people in one neighborhood may have a big beautiful park that they never use. Why? The only way to get to it is across a high-speed road with broken traffic lights and no crosswalk. That type of information informs us about the changes that need to occur at broader levels—changes such as “complete streets” policies that guide citywide street and sidewalk infrastructure development.

There’s also another challenge: Funders, policy makers and even individual taxpayers want to be able to tie environmental change to individual outcomes. They want to know, ‘You changed the environment; so has overall BMI gone down?” But the reality is that it’s difficult to tie an environmental outcome like “we added some streetlights and built some crosswalks” to a health outcome like “people on that block lost an average of 2.2 pounds.” The levels of change you have to measure are complex. So, one big part of our work has been trying to get our partners in the community even thinking about evaluations and measurement. To get them asking questions like, ‘What do we want to change, and how do we measure that?’ The goal isn’t to get them to become scientific evaluators, of course. But we do want them to be skilled at using basic tools.

Miguel Morales, Community Networker/West Town, CLOCC

The main goal of the walkability project was to give people tools to facilitate environmental changes and make outdoor activity safer. So for instance, some residents of West Humboldt Park perceived walking in the neighborhood to be unsafe because of drug activity on corners, abandoned housing and other issues. As part of the project, block club members and other residents used our assessment tool to answer detailed, block-by-block questions. Then once residents identified barriers to walkability, the second part of the tool offered information about facts and rights. It helped people understand how to access city government to make changes in the neighborhood. Then the information gathered in those initial assessments can later serve as a baseline for measuring processes effectiveness and environmental change.