According to a recent report release by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where we live matters to our health. The health of a community depends on many different factors, including the environment, education and jobs, access to and quality of healthcare, and individual behaviors.
Health varies greatly across Massachusetts counties, with some places being much healthier than others. The Foundation has been working on developing a standard method to illustrate what we know about what makes people sick or healthy and to identify what can be done to create healthier places to live, learn, work and play.
With this belief that a community’s health can be improved by implementing effective policies and programs, a conference was held last week to celebrate the recent expansion of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s (MDPH) Mass in Motion Municipal Wellness and Leadership Program into western Massachusetts.
Held at the Log Cabin in Holyoke, the conference featured speakers DPH Commissioner John Auerbach, Regional Director of U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Christie Hager, Holyoke Mayor Alex Morse, Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz, and state representatives Ellen Story and Denise Andrews.
The expansion is funded by a Community Transformation Grant awarded to MDPH by the center of disease control and Prevention, and adds Holyoke, as well as Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire counties to the current western Massachusetts communities of Mass in Motion.
The main reason for this grant is the prevalence of overweight and obese residents in Massachusetts.
According to Mass In Motion, more than half of adults and over one-quarter of high school and middle school students are overweight or obese and only 26% of Massachusetts adults eat the recommended 5 or more servings of fruits and vegetables a day.
The key elements of this initiative are a call to action, regulatory changes, an executive order by the governor, grants, work site wellness programs, the Mass In Motion website, and the MA Children at Play initiative.
Morse said there are four major areas of focus for Holyoke, including assisting the Holyoke public schools with the implementation of the nutritional guidelines, and promoting the Massachusetts Department of Transportation of safe routes to schools program.
“We hope to increase sales using mass farmers market coupons at our farmers markets by 15% over the next five years,” said Morse.
Auerbach offered some background of the program.
“I pulled together the health data of the state, so that we could get an understanding of what are the most critical health issues that we are facing and the most startling reports that came out of that data analysis was seeing the dramatic increase in the percentage of the population in the state who were overweight or obese. Every single year for the past 20 years we were seeing a dramatic increase,” said Auerbach.
In researching the statistics, Auerbach saw a steady increase in diabetes across the state.
“So we thought, we’ve got to tackle this and we should link it to our ongoing use of tobacco because we also know, while our rates of tobacco use were going down, we were still seeing the serious consequences of tobacco use,” said Auerbach.
Mass In Motion was started without funding.
“The problem that we had was that we didn’t have any money. We had great idea. People wanted to work on this issue. There was great work going on in western Massachusetts but it was isolated and it was usually based upon individual people or schools or health departments that were doing creative things, but it wasn’t coordinated,” Auerbach said. “So we kicked off, about four years ago, an unfunded campaign called Mass of Motion, and the idea behind that was, let’s try to coordinate some efforts, let’s try to raise the resources and let’s see if we can begin to make a difference.”
Organizers were able to raise $800,000 for grants to local communities.
“We looked at what had seemed to work in other places around the country and found that if you could get mayors, city councilors, selectman, working in coalition with others in their communities, to pull them together and say, ‘What are the policies we can change?’ and ‘Can we do things like create positive incentives to get fresh fruits and vegetables into the poorer neighborhoods of our communities?’ ‘Can we incorporate it to transportation priorities?’ ‘Biking, and walking and not just automobiles?’ ‘Can we make parks and recreation facilities more accessible and safer, and what can we do within the schools to make the environment of the schools easier and healthier?’ ‘ Can we get more physical activities in the schools, and can we ensure that the food in the schools is healthy?’ if we do that, we will make more progress,” said Auerbach.
Mass In Motion wanted to move away from individual counseling. Auerbach said he realized it was not decisions people made that resulted in a yearly increase in obesity, but changes in individual lives people had little control over.
“If the transportation prioritizes cars then there is no way to walk from one side to the other, or to the local store without driving. Well then people will stop walking. If parents are afraid that it is not safe for their kids to play outside then they won’t play outside,” said Auerbach. “So if we begin to think about those policy changes then it is much easier for people’s behaviors to change, that’s what Mass of Motion is all about.”
