Introducing the NBCI Jerusalem Walk Program
We will create and initiate Black fitness events nationwide by instituting concepts like the Jerusalem Walk Program. This program will encourage the congregation to walk 1.5 miles from the church to return to the church. We will promote these congregations as they walk, they will be able to sing the songs of Zion, making their walk both spiritual and healthy. There is a well-known song in the Black Church called “We are Marching to Zion, Beautiful, Beautiful Zion. We will ask our congregations to be creative by holding choir rehearsals as they walk.
MyBlackFitness.com is part of a revolution to improve Black health, a cornerstone of the National Black Health Agenda.
The National Black Church Initiative’s Health Emergency Declaration (HED) is a comprehensive approach to tackling the tragic state of health in the Black community. For decades, the African American community has seen no decrease in the health disparities gap in America despite the many attempts to fix the issue by the government and private organizations. There are many reasons why these plans did not work, but the underlying cause of all of them is that they did not have an established grounding in the Black community. Through establishing 35 innovative health prevention communities, HED plans to create actual change using proven, scientific methods to educate these communities nationwide and promote preventive healthcare among them. Because of the Black Church’s leading role in the Black community HED will have a greater and lasting impact on the African American community and seriously help to decrease the health disparities that are so prevalent within it.
HED Healthy Food and Physical Exercise Plan (HHFEP) is a comprehensive approach in dealing with the issues that surround why African Americans are not engaged in healthy food and physical exercise practices and lifestyles. HED has established core values around this initiative. There are 7 Core Values: Know your body, Visit the doctor, increase your fruit and vegetable intake by 150%, Increase your physical activity by 150%, Get enough sleep (8 Hours), Take “mental breaks” to reduce stress, and Quit smoking or do not start smoking. These core values were adopted because the body of health literature indicates that if all practices are implemented, it is less likely that one will succumb to a chronic disease. HED is a preventative initiative, and we believe that these core values prevent disease and help create a healthy lifestyle mentality in the African American community.
Chief among the HHFEP Plan is to create an education module that is based upon African American learning behaviors. We are currently finalizing a high level of sophisticated psychological intervention strategies and techniques designed by the NBCI Behavior Modification Board. This group of clinical psychologists’ chief mission is to review the health literature and develop best practices based upon the literature and pass the information along to the health panels for implementation. The information is then developed into an education module that is to be instituted in HED health communities. Presently, NBCI is reviewing healthy food curriculums from three sources – The Cooperative Extension Services, universities’ dietary programs around the country, and the US Department of Agriculture. This information will be compiled, and we will then create twelve education modules for the African American church. Once the twelve modules have been developed they will be submitted to the African American Dietary Association through Dr. Ivis Forrester of Morgan State University who serves as an Associate Professor and Director of the Nutritional Science Program for review. This is in keeping with HED insistence that only qualified personnel can conduct these education modules in our churches. This will be implemented through our Congregational Based Health Personnel Volunteer Corps (p 34).
Like all Americans, HED clearly argues that African Americans need to be persuaded to take these dramatic steps. Specifically for the African American Church, we have planned a public relations campaign to promote healthy foods and physical exercise. One of these campaigns will be the picture of our pastors with fruits and vegetables preparing these healthy foods. This will be made into a poster with the caption, “The Body is the Temple of God.” We will also create flyers with our children playing with tips on how to increase physical activity among children to fight childhood obesity. We also plan to join the First Lady – Michelle Obama Childhood Obesity Initiative, but if the truth is told, NBCI has had a childhood obesity program for the past 10 years. Our public relations campaign will be geared towards educating, motivating, and activating the energy in the black church toward healthy foods and physical exercise. We will send out email blasts, create posters, make weekly announcements at every gathering within the black church community i.e. prayer meeting, choir rehearsal, etc, on the importance of healthy living, healthy food, and physical exercise. In other words, there will not be a gathering in the black church without a commercial promoting healthy foods and physical exercise. We will post in our church’s bulletin tips, suggestions, graphs, and pictures with one expectation – to move African Americans toward choosing the correct foods and to get them moving. This public relations program will be critical to the success of the HED HHFEP Program. We are currently consulting with our Behavior Modification Board and our Volunteer PR Specialist on the most effective ways to implement this campaign within the black church.
Based upon NBCI HED Core Values, our goal is to increase African American intake of fruits and vegetables by 150% and also increase African American physical activities by 150%. Here are some of the ways that we hope to achieve these goals.
Jerusalem Walk Program
The Jerusalem Walk Program will create an occasion for congregations to walk together under the leadership of their pastor. Together, the pastor along with his or her congregation will walk the distance of one mile in an area near their church’s location. When they arrive back to the church they will receive a lecture on the benefits of physical exercise and healthy food and the importance of developing a healthy lifestyle mentality.
NBCI AND MYBLACKFITNESS Website
We also plan to alert our congregants of NBCI’s new HED website which has extraordinary information on how to get started in the area of physical exercise. For instance, we have created a one-click button on our website for the America on the Move, a national initiative to promote physical activity. Here, HED is incorporating an existing national program that has proven to be effective in getting Americans to become active. Another way in which HED is navigating our congregant’s busy schedules is through the use of the website as a tool to begin the process of changing current health patterns into healthy lifestyle choices. HED will help, through the education modules, to create a personal physical exercise plan following HED core values. For instance, the first of the core values indicates that one should see their physician before beginning any physical exercise, especially those who are over 50 or those with chronic health problems. This is important because it allows the individual to know their personal limitations are and be monitored by a qualified health provider like their doctor. Critical to HED and the promotion of physical exercise will be the direction given by our Health Panels for age specific individuals dependent upon their physical condition and whether or not they are under physician care. The Health Panel will produce literature and pass it among the congregations, spelling out very specifically how to go about creating a healthy physical exercise program. These sessions will be conducted by physical fitness experts in conjunction with qualified health professionals. The emphasis here will be: do not over exert yourself but start moving.
Characteristics of HED Healthy Food Program
We are creating a year’s menu of healthy foods for our congregants. Of course, we will consult with the African American Dietary Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association to create this menu. We know that most of this work has already been done because each of aforementioned organizations have created a “Soul Food Cookbook”. Simply, we plan to make this available and practical to our membership. For example, we plan to place a healthy recipe in our church bulletin every week based upon popular foods African Americans consume. This menu will be available on our website for easy access.
While offering general healthy recipes, the yearlong menu will place specific focus on certain target populations, especially those who have chronic health diseases such as cancer, AIDS, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.
These specific populations will also have an opportunity in our mandatory 2.5 hours of health education to ask specific questions to nutritionists, as well as dietitians, such as Dr. Ivis Forrester. HED is creating critical partnerships, not only with the aforementioned organizations, but with universities and dietary and nutritional associations though city and county Cooperative Extension Programs for the explicit purposes of helping these targeted populations gain access to experts in food and nutrition to address their specific concerns regarding their medical conditions.
Because of the church’s industrial sized food preparation facilities we are now putting together the largest food preparation classes in the country. Our vision is fairly simple, after teaching the importance of good eating habits though our Healthy Food Education Modules, we want to demonstrate on how they can learn to properly prepare meals that are good for them and their families. This is why we insisted on the development of a close working relationship with the Cooperative Extension Program though the US Department of Agriculture. Now, we clearly understand that they will not be able to service each of our churches because of our large church population. What we hope to do is to create a trainer-of-trainer model with the cooperation of the African American Dietary Association and USDA utilizing NBCI Congregational Based Health Personnel Volunteer Corps. This would in turn allow us to conduct these healthy eating programs simultaneously knowing the continuity of content, methodology, and approach as laid down by the Health Panels. The goal here through HED is to give our churches the necessary technical skills so that they can conduct their own program, remaining extremely mindful of what is being taught, how it’s being taught, and specific goals and objectives. The health panel will also provide evaluation tools for these programs properly measure its effectiveness.
HED Supermarket Food Guides
Because of illiteracy rate at 40% and the lack of nutritional knowledge, many women who shop for their families try to pick things that they would enjoy as opposed to what is healthy. Studies have indicated that 20% of the foods that parents buy can be characterized as “junk food”. HED would like to hire a nutritionist or dietitian to do a trainer-of-trainers with HED congregational base health personnel and other individuals who have the educational equivalents to be trained as Supermarket Food Guides. The theory here is simple – Mom needs help picking healthy foods for her family and picking food that is based upon the price instead of based upon the calories, especially in recessionary times. Our food guides, working along with supermarket chains, will roam up and down the aisles helping to explain to shoppers how two similarly priced items can produce healthier choices. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar can buy: 1,200 calories of potato chips, 875 calories of soda, 250 calories of vegetables and 170 calories of fruit. We should start to look at the concept of Nutritional Value / Dollar rather than Calories / Dollar. If we are successful, moms of every economic level will come out of the supermarket not only with better foods but with a better bargain. In addition, this will endear shoppers to that particular store as they know they are going to get some help.
For seniors and mothers with newborns, we will provide a more systematic approach and send our Supermarket Food Guides with them at given times to make sure that they are picking the healthiest foods based of their age or responsibility. The Supermarket Food Guide will spend about three hours a week doing this and we plan to create a volunteer core throughout each of NBCI’s faith commands – 5,000 strong at each. Such an idea would work perfectly in Walmart where there is a large selection of food items, especially in cases where fresh fruits and vegetables are available.
Approach to Junk Food
We hope to provide a scorecard on junk food working with The Center for the Science in the Public Interest. We will publish and distribute this scorecard four times a year in our NBCI Health Note. We’re trying to create an incentive program for our kids on who can stay away from junk food on a per month basis – in other words, we’re trying to teach our children that junk food is a once a month “treat” versus an everyday habit. In addition, we will publish only the healthy items on fast food menus and encourage our kids to eat these healthier options. As a prize, we will give away toy to the child to eats fruits, vegetables, and healthy items over fast food or junk food options.
Just like we have a class for our young kids in terms of financial savings, we plan to establish classes for our children concerning food choices. We will utilize our Sunday Church School as the primary vehicle for these lessons. Every week, the child would be introduced to a new fruit or vegetable and in some cases; the child would have an opportunity to cook or prepare that vegetable and eat them, passing along that food preparation instructions and nutritional information to their parents. We will make this fun and interactive, giving them aprons, etc, and teaching them the appropriate preparation and salt addition. There are a thousand ways to do this. Again, we plan to utilize some of the members from our newly formed Supermarket Guide Teams to conduct some of these courses.
HED and Farmer’s Markets
As a short term solution to the problem of providing fruits and vegetables to the African American community, HED has approached The Farmer’s Markets Association to discuss the possibility of setting up venues to sell fresh fruits and vegetables in the black church around the country. This is not only a viable idea but easily a very workable idea. We plan to begin the program by June, 2010.
The Black Farmers and The Black Church
HED is a program that refuses to reiterate the same problems that have been cited in government reports and private marketing reports as to why African Americans are not receiving the same access to purchase fruits and vegetables as their white counterparts. HED is about creating solutions to stubborn problems. Rev. C.T. Vivian, a close aide to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a recent conversation with a group of clergy explored ways to overcome this specific issue by pointing out that there is a program in Louisiana that allows African Americans to grow fruits and vegetables on land owned by African Americans but not in use. It works like this – they approach young African Americans, who are currently unemployed at 50% within major urban American cities, to spend part of their summer on these unutilized lands learning about farming and growing vegetables. Rev. Vivian noted that the program has been enormously successful in that these teens are able to feed their communities and provide employment opportunities for these struggling African American males. NBCI is exploring the possibility of duplicating this program around the country to deal with the issue of the lack of fruits and vegetables as a long-term solution. This is why it is important to develop a relationship with the USDA Extension Program, whose original mission was to assist farmers.
NBCI And Your Company Can Work Together
There are many ways in which HED and Your Company can work together to promote healthy food and physical exercise through the HHFEP Plan. One way is for Your Company to make fruits and vegetables available in their stores, which will be easily accessible to African Americans in their community. Given that African Americans are more likely than other communities to be without and do not live around comprehensive grocery stores providing a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, we believe that Walmart is an ideal fit for our community given that Your Company is within 20 miles from our faith community utilizing our Church Van Network in our 150,000 churches.
Secondly, we can incentivize these programs through Your Company sponsorship. Specifically, Walmart can provide grants, odometers, tee shirts, water, and/or other paraphernalia to promote the Jerusalem Walk Program.
Thirdly, Your Company can play a critical role in our public relations campaign. We can work together to develop a theme between African American churches and Walmart. For instance, “Working toward a healthy community”. This particular theme can be printed on NBCI member church bulletins, flyers, mugs, buttons, and posters, especially the above campaign as promoted by the church pastor. In doing so, we can give NBCI congregants and the general public points, like airline points, which are gained through participation in projects like the Jerusalem Walk Program, for which the incentive could be Walmart coupons or cards to be used to purchase a healthy item.
Fourthly, healthy item purchases will be a mutually beneficial promotion for both HED Healthy Food and Physical Exercise Plan (HHFEP) and Walmart. We envision this collaboration working in this way: if a shopper enters Walmart and purchases a certain amount of healthy items, they gain a corresponding number of points that would entitle them to discounts on physical health items like workout clothes upon achieving certain point levels. This is a way in which Walmart and HED can move products to benefit the consumer in a tangible way and measure the effectiveness of the campaign. This measurement will serve as the evaluation component that HED insists on. This particular program can be integrated into existing Walmart programs, tweaking the particulars of the program to fit both our needs. NBCI HED would endorse something like this to demonstrate its economic persuasive capabilities.
Fifthly, like the Walmart healthy coupon program, we would like to institute the same program for items pertaining to physical fitness – clothing items, odometers, exercise equipment, etc.
The above plan is a clear example of how HED plans to significantly impact the food and physical personality of the African American church. These programs, at this stage of African American life and culture, are not only a good idea but critical to its very survival. We have specifically indicated how each of these components of HHFEP fits within the Health Emergency Plan and how NBCI and Walmart can join together to promote the critical HED core values that according to all health experts create a new healthy lifestyle among all targeted groups.
The program that we’ve created is not only good for African Americans but good for all Americans. According to recent medical studies cited within the HED Paper (pg 24) – obesity, declining physical activity, and declining consumption of fruits and vegetables have been increasing at an alarmingly rapid rate, contributing to the health crisis that Americans are currently facing. The HED Healthy Food and Physical Exercise Program is to be instituted in health communities utilizing the best education methodology in informing African Americans how to adopt a healthy lifestyle. NBCI is responding to this health emergency by creating this proactive, effective, and necessary plan to reverse the damage unhealthy lifestyles have caused and to prevent a reoccurrence in the future.
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