Wellness Champions for Change

About Us

‌‌Wellness Championsfor Change (WCC) is a five year project funded by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). This project has two main goals: to bring together teams of teachers, administrators, staff and parents to carry out the school system’s wellness policy, and to empower students to advocate for a health-promoting school environment and encourage their peers to make healthy decisions. We will examine the impact of these efforts on student diet, physical activity and obesity. In this project, we will work with elementary and middle schools throughout the state of Maryland.

The overall goal of the Wellness Champions for Change project is to create health-promoting school environments that support healthy growth and aid in the prevention of childhood obesity.  Our approach involves enhancing school-level wellness policy implementation through training teachers and students to be Wellness Champions (WC) and providing technical assistance to schools and school systems. This project is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Objectives

• Evaluate the impact of a school-based intervention (to enhance implementation of LWP’s) on health behaviors (diet and physical activity ) and weight status of elementary and middle school students
• Evaluate the added impact of a student-led school based intervention
• Examine factors in the home and school-neighborhood environments that moderate the impact of the intervention on health behavior and weight status
• Examine the reach the reach and fidelity of the intervention when disseminated

Tools & Resources

Toolkits

USDA Local School Wellness Policy Outreach Toolkit

The Team

PI: Erin Hager, PhD, Associate Professor
Hannah Lane, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow
Perri Carroll, Research Assistant
Taylor Sheldon, Research Assistant
Rachel Deitch, MS, CHES, Project Coordinator