Health & Fitness
Help Youth Lead the Way to Healthy Futures
Some 40% of charitable donations are made in December. Woburn residents are surely very generous with their time and treasure, and I would suspect contribute more than their fair share of the $300 billion Americans donate each year. So I suspect many Woburn residents will be making donations this month. With that mind, I'm sharing about the Social Capital Inc. (SCI) campaign to "Empower Young Leaders". If you'd like to give to a charity rooted in Woburn, serving communities throughout Eastern Massachusetts, we will put your donations to good use!
Halfway through our campaign to empower youth to lead change, we’re closing in on our fundraising goal of $2,100. I hope that you’ll consider a donation to help us raise the final $463 we need to help train young leaders in Woburn and beyond. If you’ve already donated, thanks for getting us this far!
The teen leaders we train address a wide variety of community issues, but youth we work with have long had a strong interest in promoting healthy behaviors. This has included the Lynn Part of the Solution group focusing on substance abuse prevention, Woburn teens working on anti-bullying efforts, and an annual teen-led Safe Love Dorchester event to promote healthy relationships. This interest in health is one reason SCI’s new strategic plan focuses our social capital building on health and wellness outcomes along with youth success. You can read more about this plan here on our blog.
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Some of our newest youth leadership program partners have a very specific focus on health issues. One of SCI’s newest youth councils this year is the Lynn Youth Health Alliance through the Lynn Food and Fitness program. Currently the youth council is working on recruiting stores for the healthy corner store project in Lynn. One store has already agreed to participate and youth are beginning to do full store assessments to identify strengths of the store's healthy inventory as well as identify areas that the store could improve it's healthy options selection.
In addition to this new program in Lynn, this fall we also began training the Healthy Chelsea Youth Food Movement teens on communication skills to promote healthy eating, and supporting the Gloucester Youth Council’s efforts to prevent substance abuse.
