The Wellmark Foundation’s funding efforts focuses on improving the health of Iowa and South Dakota communities through prevention. Specifically, our funding seeks to facilitate programs targeting:

• Childhood obesity prevention
• Community-based wellness and prevention

The overarching opportunity this funding offers is to create and resource healthy community demonstrations to evaluate the effects of a full complement of health-promoting policies and programs.

The following represent the types of projects we seek to support in the areas of childhood obesity prevention and community-based wellness and prevention. This is not an exhaustive list and is meant to stimulate community thinking and planning around what might be possible in your setting:

• Enhance efforts to ensure that all children have quality early developmental support (child care, education, and other services).
• Support strategies to enhance WIC and SNAP (Food Stamps) programs and/or to meet the food security needs of the hungry with nutritious foods.
• Support public-private collaborations to create access to healthy foods in communities where that is currently difficult to achieve.
• Enhance efforts to offer children only healthy foods in schools, school environments, and school-based events.
• Support schools (K-12) including time for all children to be physically active every day and/or effectively integrating health literacy strategies into the curriculum.
• Achieve and advance smoke-free state status.
• Advance efforts to ensure that decision-makers in all sectors have the evidence they need to build health into public and private policies and practices.
• Help communities improve the ability to produce, distribute, and purchase foods from farms and local sources.
• Implement population-based interventions to increase demand for and access to evidence-based preventive health screenings and recommended immunizations.
• Advance efforts to increase knowledge and adoption of breastfeeding.
• Enhance community efforts around built environment to support walking and bicycling in neighborhoods and communities of all kinds.
• Foster community coalitions or collaborations to address obesity across the lifespan and improve nutrition habits and advance vigorous and regular physical activity.
• Develop media campaigns, utilizing multiple channels (print, radio, web, television, social networking, and other methods) to promote healthy eating and active living (energy balance). This could include social marketing programs that emphasize the multiple benefits of sustained physical activity or counter-advertising against sedentary activities to reach youth and families.
• Plan and maintain a network of sidewalks and street crossings that creates a safe and comfortable walking environment that connects to schools, parks, and other community destinations.
• Collaborate with school districts and other organizations to establish joint use of facilities agreements allowing playing fields, playgrounds, and recreation centers to be used by community residents when schools are closed.

Prevention is the global theme of the Foundation’s funding agenda. The Spectrum of Prevention outlined below is a systematic tool that promotes a multifaceted range of activities for effective prevention.

These project level definitions highlight that prevention goes beyond education and the individual. As you consider potential proposals, think about these distinctions. Grant support could take the form of planning grants, community-based program implementation, organizational capacity building, health policy advancement, or a combination of these.

The Spectrum of Prevention is a Prevention Institute tool originally developed by Larry Cohen in 1983 while working as director of Prevention Programs at the Contra Costa California County Health Department. It is based upon the work of Dr. Marshall Swift in preventing developmental disabilities. More information is available at the Prevention Institute.