The award-winning Children’s Healthy Living (CHL) program just got a booster shot, to the tune of $10M.
With this game-changing grant from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Sustainable Agricultural Systems Program, CHL will create a ‘Food Systems Model’ that will identify the drivers of resiliency in food supply chains, and promote them throughout the Pacific Basin.
The five-year, project will start by developing a ‘systems dynamics,’ transdisciplinary, multilevel food and nutrition security resiliency model, explains P.I. Rachel Novotny of the Dept. of Human Nutrition, Food and Animal Sciences. Using this model, the researchers will provide graduate training to future leaders in the region in food and nutrition security model development. Additionally, they will incorporate the model’s key results and tools into community programs, including online access to simulation tools to guide change in multilevel systems.
“Our goals are to increase food and nutrition security, diet quality, and healthy body size among children,” she says. “Long-term, we aim to help prevent chronic disease in households and communities across the U.S.-affiliated Pacific insular area, which includes Alaska, Hawaiʻi, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. The findings and tools will also help guide education and Extension programs.”
Rachel adds, “This grant will help provide the data needed to guide policies so that Pacific food systems can assure the health of children, and thus a healthy future.”
Read the full grant.