CHL Gets a Cool Couple of Million

Rachel Novotny’s (Human Nutrition, Food and Animal Sciences) Children’s Healthy Living (CHL) Program for Remote Underserved Minority Populations in the Pacific Region has been awarded a Center of Excellence designation and $2.126 million in supplemental funding from USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) for successfully decreasing the prevalence of obesity in the Pacific. In 2011, CHL was awarded a competitive grant of $25 million over five years from NIFA to monitor, develop, and test community-based approaches to decreasing the level of childhood obesity and diabetes-related disease in the U.S. Pacific, and to provide training and other outreach. The project works with public and private partners in Hawai‘i, Alaska, American Samoa, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of Palau, and Republic of the Marshall Islands, regions that are not surveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in its national program to monitor health and nutrition. Via its new designation as a Center of Excellence and with the new funding, the program can further build capacity and generate new knowledge on child health in partnering communities. It will expand its distance-education courses through curricular tools such as a place-based Pacific-focused Open Education Resource textbook and will offer a Certificate in Child Health. It will also develop continuing-education training opportunities appropriate for health professionals in the region. A UH News story and a KITV story discuss the project in more detail.