Kick the can: A possible model for occupy healthcare’s next step?

Posted on February 14, 2012 by pursuitofPH — 2 Comments ↓

The recently launched “Kick the Can” website, a project of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy aiming to “give the boot” to sugary drinks, is cleanly designed, intuitive to use, and provides important and actionable information organized into the following sections: facts, advocacy tools, information on what’s happening where, multimedia galleries of videos and images (and a place to share your own), specific ways to take action, and a blog.

In addition to in and of itself being a wonderful resource addressing a topic that is important to the #occupyhealthcare cause, I think the site serves as a great example of what could be a next step for our work here at occupy healthcare. As we aim to move from discussion to action, taking the organization system of this website (facts, advocacy tools, a map of what’s happening where, a multimedia center, information on taking action, and a blog) and applying it to specific subtopics we prioritize to create a new and revised website could be a concrete step in the direction we wish to move.

Please share your thoughts! Does this direction make sense?

In my next post, I will try to compile some of the specific subtopics that have been brought up in previous occupy healthcare posts and tweets as a possible place to start.

About pursuitofPH

Vinu Ilakkuvan received her Masters of Science degree in Society, Human Development, and Health from the Harvard School of Public Health in May 2011. She currently works in youth violence prevention in Richmond, Virginia, and blogs about public health at www.pursuitofpublichealth.com

Tagged with: occupy healthcare, public health, website
Posted in Community, Health behavior, healthcare, public health

Carmen

Vinu:

This is probably a small, but tangible way for people to begin to take back their neighborhood’s health. So much of a school’s budget is built around subsidies from sponsors, including soda companies, that it becomes a dilemma. The choice ends up being long-term health vs. fiscal solvency and money tends to win out. I’ll check out the site, looking for stats on how minority communities are affected by sugary drink infusion in schools. I suspect more kids of color have a soda-heavy diet than their white peers, leading to more disease associations later on.
http://www.pursuitofpublichealth.com/ pursuitofPH

Thanks for the comment, Carmen. You are absolutely right about the competing interests of long-term health and fiscal solvency, and the specific case of soda company money influencing schools. In addition to soda in schools, general availability contributes to the disparities you mention – the percentage of beverages sold in stores in low-income communities that are high in sugar is generally higher than in stores elsewhere. There are some great initiatives happening in conjunction w/ corner stores addressing this very problem – http://www.thefoodtrust.org/php/programs/corner.store.campaign.php, http://www.dchunger.org/projects/cornerstore.html.
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