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AUNI Mission
The Urban Nutrition Initiative (UNI) is a university-community partnership that engages K-16+ learners in an active, real-world problem-solving curriculum that strives to improve community nutrition and wellness. Update
PROGRAM SUMMARY
The Agatston Urban Nutrition Initiative (AUNI) works to improve community nutrition and health in Philadelphia by developing and implementing a comprehensive set of activities in specified neighborhoods. AUNI activities are a major component of the University of Pennsylvania’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships’ university-assisted community schools (UACS) program. A key component of UACS is academically-based community service, a problem-solving learning approach that simultaneously addresses community problems while improving K-16+ education.
THE PROBLEMS OF OBESITY, HEALTH AND EDUCATION
Recently, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) predicted that 33% of children born in the United States during 2005 would develop diabetes. Among African-American children the projection is a staggering 50%. Many of the schools in West Philadelphia served by UNI have among the highest rates of childhood obesity in the nation, some of them higher than 20 %. According to the 2000 census, several of our partner neighborhoods in West Philadelphia rank among the poorest urban communities in the United States, lack basic resources such as grocery stores, and suffer from disproportionately high rates of diet-related disease. Along with community health problems, West Philadelphia’s minority, low-income populations face greater challenges in terms of high school drop-out rates and unemployment than ever before.
AUNI’S SOLUTION
The complex, pervasive and inter-related problems of obesity and diet-related disease require a solution that is comprehensive and incorporates work with education systems, food systems, the local environment, and other factors. AUNI supports university-assisted community schools (UACS) so that schools become centers for improving nutrition and wellness, while reducing the burden of obesity, for the students and the entire community. More specifically, AUNI organizes school day, after school and summer learning opportunities in twenty Philadelphia public schools, serving more than 10,000 students every month. The success of AUNI is based on the engagement of young people, including university and public school students, as community problem solvers. Over the past decade AUNI has worked with an increasing number of school and community partners. At the same time, the program has become integrated into the workings of many courses at Penn across multiple departments and schools. The model of university-assisted community schools represents a strategy to sustain AUNI through integration into courses at the university level as well as into the public school curriculum.
CORE APPROACHES
AUNI is based on several core principles which combine hands-on nutrition education, community-problem solving and research to foster long-term school and neighborhood partnerships.
University Partnerships
AUNI is housed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships. Like its parent organization, AUNI is based on the premise that universities are uniquely positioned to solve complex and interconnected problems of the American city. AUNI forges academic partnerships linking the improvement of food systems to teaching and research at the University of Pennsylvania and in public schools. This collaborative work typically involves many stakeholders, including Penn students, faculty, and public school partners in efforts to address community problems and to bring about concrete and systemic change. Penn is a leader of local, national and international networks of institutions of higher education committed to engagement with their local communities.
University-Assisted Community Schools
Since 1985, collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania, led by the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and West Philadelphia school and community partners, has helped to transform existing public schools into university-assisted community schools throughout the local neighborhoods. This approach focuses on the public school as the core institution, the hub, for community engagement and democratic development. AUNI supports university-assisted community school programs, including evening, weekend, extended day and summer activities, which are anchored in a close partnership with the school day curriculum. Extended day and school day programs emphasize the integration of service learning with academics and job-readiness and involve parents and families.
Real World Problem Solving
AUNI transcends traditional models of nutrition education by engaging learners in hands-on efforts to improve their local food system while working to solve the systemic problems that are manifested in nutrition-related disease. Students internalize healthy eating habits as they work to share these messages with the broader community. AUNI is based on the idea that program participants must be active participants in designing, operating and evaluating interventions if they are to be long-lasting and successful.
Specific Geographic Areas
AUNI is focused on integrating and aggregating a critical mass of activities in a network of public schools that serve particular neighborhoods. This approach combines longitudinal involvement for children and families and neighborhood environmental change.
MAJOR ACTIVITIES
AUNI’s major activities fit into four general categories.
- Integrated School Day Nutrition Education and Academically-Based Community Service
Through Eat Right Now, the School District of Philadelphia’s Comprehensive Nutrition Education Program, AUNI conducts nutrition education programs in 20 Philadelphia public schools. The primary focus of Eat Right Now is on increasing the nutrition knowledge of K-12 students. UNI incorporates as many hands-on components (such as monthly healthy food tastings) into this program as possible. In many cases, university students enrolled in nutrition-related service-learning courses, work with public school students to explore and address specific nutrition-related issues in the community.
- Increasing Access to Healthy Foods
AUNI engages young people in organizing better choices for their communities through school and community based efforts. Through AUNI, public school students work to improve lunchroom choices and operate after-school fruit stands. AUNI also works with public school students to help neighborhood food stores create convenient healthy food stations and to operate community farmers’ markets.
- Increasing Opportunities for Participation in Regular Physical Activity
Through school day, after-school and summer programs AUNI improves opportunities for youth and families to exercise regularly. AUNI works with PE teachers and school coordinators to improve exercise opportunities during PE class and recess time and, through the Netter Center for Community Partnerships’ community schools program, AUNI offers family-oriented exercise classes during evening programs.
- Youth-Led organizing, Peer Education and Internships
Increasingly, people recognize the important role that youth can play as organizers of solutions to societal problems on a variety of levels; as the deliverers of social and educational services, as the developers of model programs, and as key informants to policy makers. In addition to school day peer education, AUNI coordinates job-training and youth leadership programs for high school students. The AUNI internship program engages teens in organizing better food choices in their communities by working after school for 10 hours per week. AUNI interns combine direct service approaches, which include teaching healthy cooking classes and growing healthy foods in school gardens for sale at farmers’ markets, with advocating for broader systems change. This spring, AUNI high school interns are organizing the Youth Action Council for the Philadelphia Urban Food and Fitness Alliance (PUFFA). They have also been highly involved in youth organizing on a regional and national level.
AUNI AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
AUNI has been cited by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as one of four promising model for improving health and nutrition among children in the United States. In 2003, the university-assisted community school programs supported by the Netter Center were recognized by the National Academy of Science as the winner of the W.T Grant Youth Development Award. AUNI was one of three specific programs noted by the National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Children, Youth and Families. In 2005, UNI was recognized by Campus Compact as one of eight Exemplary Campus Community Partnerships in the United States. In 2008, Penn was selected as one of three schools in the country to receive the Presidential Award for General Community Service as part of the Corporation for National and Community Service’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll Award. The Netter Center, our work in the community schools, and AUNI all received specific mention. AUNI has also received lots of local recognition including best year-round youth internship program by Work Ready Philadelphia, a program of the Philadelphia Youth Network (2007).
A REPLICABLE MODEL
Contributing to the sustainability of AUNI’s programs, is an increased focus on entrepreneurship, engaging youth in systems change and sharing AUNI’s approach through city-wide and national trainings. Through local and national networks of universities committed to public service, UNI believes this model is also broadly replicable as a collaborative and sustainable approach to improve the health and education of community, school, and university partners.
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