Page Alliance for Community Action (PACA) is a coalition of government agencies, service organizations, community members and youth that collaborate to promote healthy and positive development of families in Page County. In 2012, the coalition created a HCAT with funding from VFHY and developed an Action Plan to combat childhood obesity. The Action Plan focuses on the promising practices that improve our youths’ healthy behaviors, resources and access to healthy opportunities. The projects our HCAT will focus on in the three year VFHY work plan will improve the access to safe parks and recreational activities in our community and promote more healthy choices for our youth during the school day. Our work plan includes working with the towns of Stanley, Luray and Shenandoah to install a splash pad at Hawksbill Park, improve the playground equipment at Dean Park and complete the WigWam Village playground project. Our HCAT will also work with the school division to install water bottle filling stations to increase the daily intake of water for our youth. These projects will ensure our local parks are safe and appealing to our families plus encourage our youth to choose drinking water over sugar drinks. Our work plan will continue the successful projects/activities that our HCAT members have established in our community and schools. These strategies include marketing our HCAT activities and accomplishments on social media and PACA website to build our coalition capacity by recruiting and maintaining new members; working in the schools with facilitating nutritional curriculum and physical activities; supporting the school division’s Wellness policy which regulates the nutrition and physical activities of the students; providing free and discounted scholarships for disadvantaged youth to participate in community runs, swim lessons and athletic camps; and working with our high school youth to provide healthy events for their peers.

The Orange HCAT will hit the ground running with two four-hour workshops to develop governance documents and a strategic plan. The Orange HCAT will also begin implementing local activities and systematic changes at all Orange County School Aged Childcare program sites as well as the Love Outreach Food Pantry, a subset of the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, and a highly frequented food pantry located in the Town of Orange. The ultimate goal of the Orange HCAT is to provide more fresh produce options and interactive educational opportunities about healthy eating choices, as well as more outdoor/physical activity opportunities to Orange County youth. Additionally, a social media presence will assist in raising awareness of youth obesity as well as local resources, opportunities, and ways for the public to get involved in HCAT efforts, etc.

RACS’ Prevention Services Unit implements Too Good for Drugs (TGFD) to about 680 students in grades 2 – 6 in the Buena Vista and Lexington Schools. To meet fidelity requirements, prevention educators will conduct a minimum of ten consecutive sessions of 30-50 minutes weekly for each group during regular classroom hours. MOAs assure that we serve all youth in those grades/classes based on actual enrollment numbers for the school year.

The STAR Kids program delivers the Al’s Pals Healthy Decision-Making & Anti-Smoking curriculum to 11 Head Start classrooms and Barrett Early Learning Center in Charlottesville and four surrounding counties serving approximately 220 children (ages of 3-5) every year.