Philadelphia's Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) goals were to:

1. Increase access to healthy, affordable foods
2. Decrease the availability of nutrient poor, calorie dense foods
3. Enhance opportunities for safe, structured physical activity.

The ultimate aim was to decrease obesity prevalence and incidence and obesity-related morbidity and mortality

Through this funding, the Philadelphia Department of Public Health (PDPH) and its evaluation partners were poised to enhance evaluation efforts by augmenting BMI measured in children, adding physical activity and food intake measurements among children and adults, and broadening food environment assessments in corners stores and schools. For this enhanced evaluation, PDPH partnered with nationally renowned obesity prevention researchers, Dr. Gary Foster, Director, Center for Obesity Research and Education, Temple University, and Dr. Karen Glanz, Director, Center for Health Behavior Research, University of Pennsylvania.

We focused our efforts on two interventions:

1. The Healthy Corner Store Initiative, which engaged 1000 small corner stores across the city to sell nutritious foods
2. School Wellness Councils, which aimed to eliminate unhealthy competitive foods from 200 schools.

The CHBR team led the collection of environmental measures including a NEMS-based food environment assessment of 200 corner stores and Standardized school food environment assessments in 100 K-8 schools.  This enhanced evaluation achieved synergy across different evaluation components and took advantage of cross-sectoral collaboration between government, public education, community, and academia.

Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention