It Takes Guts to Fight Obesity

A little history

Hello all! So I just joined and I was wondering if anybody could fill me in on a little bit of the history of the group. Why was it originally formed? Who started all of it and how did you grow your network in such a big way?

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Permalink Reply by Ruben Brambila on November 12, 2009 at 12:49pm

Hello Jessica,

welcome to our site. This site was was birthed from the Healthy Eating Active Communities (HEAC) sites in both South Los Angeles and Baldwin Park. These sites have been working with youth for years and empowering them to take action in their community so that their environments/communities could been better equipped to combat obesity. For example, in South LA there is a scarcity of grocery stores and healthy food options and abundance of fast food. Because of lobbying and youth involvement, the city has now passed a moratorium that bans new fast food restaurants being built in the city. To help harness the power of youth and meet them at their level, both HEAC sites partnered with Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to apply and receive a new two-year grant that would expand the reach of their existing work and develop and mentor new youth leaders over the internet. After receiving the grant, I was hired as the Project Manager and we worked with each HEAC site to work with 20 youth at each HEAC site (40 total). Some were initially involved in the previous HEAC work and some were not. These "YAAO Youth Leaders" were trained on topics of nutrition, physical activity, policy creation, environmental change, online social networks, video creation, etc. for 13 months. The product of all their hard work is the website you are now on. Every aspect of WereFedUp.com was developed with the feedback provided by these 40 youth. Our network has grown by ads that were placed on Facebook, MySpace, Teen.com. Posters were produced and spread throughout certain parts of LA. We also had media events at each site to promote the opening. The events generated (and still generate) a lot of media attention. Next month, we will be kicking off some contests that promote users to take pictures of their community (more details will come). We hope this contest will help generate more traffic and users to the site.

Thanks for your inquiry! Feel free to hit us up whenever!