Make a Commitment to Wellness!

With your help, our community can change the alarming national trends towards lower life expectancy and obesity for the next generation that the modern American diet and an inactive lifestyle contributes to. We strive to teach our community how to eat for life: to set our children up to thrive and live their best life. We want to help  you develop a healthy relationship to food and an active lifestyle. And we need you to support HCZ's healthy nutrition environment.

Be A Positive Example

Adult members of the Harlem Children's Zone and Promise Academy communities set an example for our children. Whether you are a teacher, a parent or a member of the staff you help our kids learn to recognize food as fuel for their growing bodies and active minds. You can also help us teach the next generation of Harlem's children healthy ways to celebrate their own food traditions as a unique expression of family and culture while modeling what kinds of foods they should be seeking out and piling on their plates. Click to read more about HCZ's Wellness Policy and our Community Food Pledges.

Eat for Life

The basics of a healthy balanced diet are simple, but not always easy to satisfy. Essentially our bodies need a variety of fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean proteins to function well. Our bodies also do best when we are active--for kids that means at least 60 minutes of active play a day! We've got lots of opportunities to get active around HCZ for parents, staff and students to take advantage of.

Create Change

Too much of the food that is readily available in Harlem and across the country is heavily processed and full of excessive salt, sugar and chemical additives. Whether you call it fast food or junk food the additives can cause high blood pressure, interfere with mental focus, cause mood swings, interrupt our natural sleep cycles and even contribute to our risk of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. We encourage you to fill your diet with more "whole foods" that are minimally processed and free of all the junk that's snuck its way into the typical American diet.

Simple, not easy

We recognize that changing your diet (especially as an adult) is not an easy task. That's why we're committed to helping you any way we can. Please let us know if you have specific needs or questions about eating well or feeding your family healthfully and we'll do our best to serve your specific needs. In the meantime, check out some of the excellent resources available around the web to help you eat better, get more activity and get involved with movements for creating positive change in our food systems locally and nationally.

Please visit our Wellness Resources to link to some of our favorite sites, groups and tools about healthy eating, living well, and making positive changes for yourself, your kids and your community.

Help Us Get our Garden Going!

Every year as winter thaws out into spring we get giddy thinking about returning to our work in the garden. We've ordered the seeds and are gearing up to start planting once the risk of frost has passed. Everyone who's a part of HCZ is invited to join in the fun of getting the garden ready to go! In fact, all next week, April 18th-22nd, we are hosting Community Garden Work Days from 1-4pm in the 5th Floor Terrace Garden. We'll be outside, unless there is rain, and you can come and help us:

• Test the soil PH
• Feed the soil
• Clean up from the long winter!
• Start our compost heap
• Turn and till the soil to prepare it for new seeds and seedlings
• Weed out any stubborn plants that have found their way into the planters

It's going to be a great week of garden prep and we hope to see you there. If you have any questions or want to schedule a specific time to come with your class or group, please email our gardener, Miss Mia, at mlittlejohn@hcz.org. See you in the garden!

New Cafeteria Posters Help You Understand Healthy Eating!

Promise Academy Cafeteria Posters

If you eat in the Promise Academy Cafeteria, you've probably noticed some new posters greeting you as you enter to get your food. Our Educated Eaters Project is working hard to get everyone at HCZ--children and adults, staff and parents--to understand what motivates the foods that we serve in our cafeteria, and what we mean when we talk about "eating well." We've developed 8 posters about the following ideas:

• You Are What You Eat
• How To Eat Well
• Food Fuels Your Body
• Food For Thought
• Eat Local and Think Global
• End the Obesity Epidemic
• Eat Well + Be Active = Healthier You
• Avoid Empty Calories

The posters are colorfully accented with photos of fruits and veggies, but besides being beautiful they all have important messages for our community. We hope you'll take a look at them the next time you come join us for Sloppy Joe's or Braised Ox Tails. In the meantime, we're launching a new series on this blog that will go along with these posters, give you some additional food for thought, and describe some of the science behind statements like "eat well, be well." So, stay tuned!

It's time to plan our garden!

As New Yorkers look ahead to the first real warm day this year, gardeners across the city are dreaming up what to plant once the soil thaws enough to be workable. Our 5th Floor Terrace Garden needs some spring cleaning and TLC, but for now we're plotting what to put where and ordering seeds. In fact, we've already got some seedlings started in one of our 4th grade science classrooms.

On the list of what we hope to plant this year:

• Strawberries
• Corn
• Peas
• Heirloom Tomatoes
• Brussels Sprouts
• Collard Greens
• Watermelon
• Blueberries
• Eggplant
• Okra
• Lettuce
• Herbs
• Cucumbers
• Peppers

What else should we add?

Food Pledges

Our Wellness Policy outlines our commitments to delivering a healthier nutrition environment. This work could not be done without a supportive and engaged staff.  As a community we pledge to:

1. Protect the HCZ healthy nutrition environment.
2. Keep “outside” food out of students’ hands and out of their view.
3. Recognize that food should not be used as a reward or punishment.

Healthy Homeroom Tips

We are pleased to announce that we are now providing teachers at Promise Academy with daily nutrition tips to discuss with their students during homeroom. Teachers can access the tips via the bulletin board on Infinite Campus. Tips will be themed around food, nutrition, and fitness.

Welcome to HCZ's Wellness Connection

At HCZ Community Wellness and Health is one of our top priorities. We have a variety of programs that work in this arena including the Educated Eaters Program, the Children's Health Fund and the Healthy Living Initiative. Find out more about each of these programs by clicking on the tabs at the top of this page.

One of the toughest challenges facing our children is obesity. Over the past three decades, childhood obesity rates in America have tripled, and today, nearly one in three children in our country are overweight or obese. Childhood obesity contributes to adult health problems like diabetes, heart disease and hypertension.

We all want our children to achieve excellence—both in their schoolwork and their quality of life. The Harlem Children’s Zone is firmly committed to creating a healthy nutrition environment that supports and encourages an active lifestyle; we need help from staff, teachers, parents and students to cultivate a consistent message and reinforce healthy habits at HCZ. We tackle this important issue from a variety of fronts like serving healthier foods in the cafeteria, encouraging physical activity, and educating our community about the connection between nutrition and health.

At HCZ and Promise Academy, we are committed to:

1. Feed students a balanced healthy diet that is nutritious, delicious and sets them up to focus and succeed in their schoolwork and thrive in their lives.
2. Teach our community—by education and example—how to relate to food in a healthy way by improving nutrition education to staff, students and parents.
3. Encourage students and all members of our community to understand the relationship between healthy eating, an active lifestyle and their success—in and out of the classroom.

We are excited to get our entire community involved in our efforts to create a healthier environment and this blog is a way for us to all share in the vision and support this important goal. Thanks for visiting! Stop by again soon!