Childhood obesity
Helping our children keep healthy and thriving is a big focus of our work today.
Childhood obesity is a global problem, with 70 million young people predicted to be obese by 2025. It’s a complex issue and a major challenge locally, with rates in Lambeth and Southwark among the highest in the country.
We know that the impact of place is as important as individual choice. Both affect the strongest drivers of obesity - eating behaviour and physical activity.
For us, the combined lens of urban living and deprivation is critical. These are key ingredients of ‘obesogenic environments’ – those that encourage people to eat unhealthily and not do enough exercise. We believe that improving these environments is crucial if we want to create a long-term sustainable impact and reduce childhood obesity in our local area.
How we plan to tackle childhood obesity
We want to take a whole system, cross sector approach that focuses on creating environments that support and encourage nutritious eating and physical activity in the places that children of all ages spend their time: home, school and neighbourhood.
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We want to:
- Focus on particular neighbourhoods so we can better understand the drivers and solutions
- Layer up initiatives to create a concentration of activity around the children and families who live there
- Enable great ideas, sustaining current high potential approaches and replicating successful initiatives to grow impact
- Join forces with others to build and share both local and international evidence and expertise
Our programme steps
We’re committed to taking a long-term perspective of at least five years. We believe that by working in partnership with others, we can achieve step-change impact. We are currently in the development phase.
Programme lead: