Kellogg Announces $32.5 Million to Improve Access to Healthy Food, Physical Activity

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan, has announced a $32.5 million investment to implement community-driven efforts and national initiatives that improve access to fresh food and physical activity for vulnerable children and their families.

Nine communities will receive initial funding of almost $11 million through the new Food & Community initiative, which will work to encourage community leaders and organizations to come together to address four priorities: transforming school food systems, improving community food environments, promoting routine physical activity, and sustaining and expanding the growing national movement for healthful food and active living. The initiative will also leverage existing regional and national investments by the foundation to inform policy and systems change.

Nine communities that participated in the foundation's Food & Fitness initiative in 2007 — Boston, Detroit, Holyoke (Massachusetts), New York City, northeast Iowa, Oakland, Philadelphia, Seattle/King County, and the Tohono O'odham Nation in Arizona — have spent more than two years planning and piloting local approaches to creating healthier communities and will receive grants to implement their action plans over the next three years.

"As a foundation, we can make the greatest impact on the health of the nation by focusing on the environments where vulnerable children and families live, learn, work, and play," said Gail C. Christopher, vice president for programs at the Kellogg Foundation.

“W.K. Kellogg Foundation Grants $32.5 Million to Improve Access to... W.K. Kellogg Foundation Press Release 11/16/09.

For more information about the Kellogg Foundation’s Food & Community investment, visit the program online at http://bit.ly/food_community. You can also follow Food & Community on Twitter at www.twitter.com/food_community.