CANFIT’s Appeal

Tick. Tock. Youth don’t stop, just because the bell rings. The school day ends but not the need for healthy food and physical activity environments!

You’ve probably heard about efforts to keep kids healthy at school by improving the food they eat and helping them stay active. But what happens after the bell rings at the end of the day? 

For many economically disadvantaged youth, the hours spent outside of school are the toughest because they are spent in neighborhoods with limited options for nutritious foods and few safe places to be active. Many of these neighborhoods lack full-service supermarkets. Instead, they host disproportionately more fast food outlets, convenience stores, and liquor stores than middle-class neighborhoods. Crime, traffic, and a lack of safe open spaces, such as parks, often make it difficult and frankly, undesirable, for teens to be physically active outdoors.

So even as schools provide better nutrition and physical activities for their students, the need for similar support during afterschool hours remains. Success begins with good health, and our teens deserve every chance to succeed in life. Starting now.

Helping Communities Now to Build a Strong Future

For the last 20 years, CANFIT has been working with leaders in low-income communities and communities of color to improve the food and fitness environment for youth in out-of-school time. CANFIT supports community-based organizations, teachers, afterschool program leaders, and mentors with trainings and tools that are practical (really), culturally and age appropriate, and reflect youth culture (really).

CANFIT provides local leaders, community members, and teens with strategies for changing policies and turning their neighborhoods into healthy places. CANFIT is all about creating tools, strategies, lessons, and recipes that appeal to youth and reflect foods from their culture along with fitness activities that won’t inspire teen eyes to roll. CANFIT also works to make nutrition more understandable so all families can make healthy food choices – even with limited resources.

We’re making progress! So far, since 1993 we’ve:
• Provided training and resources to over 800 after-school programs and community-based organizations around the country (testimonials)
• Trained 5,000+ youth leaders, staff, and youth
• Awarded more than $1 million in grants and scholarships to programs and youth aspiring to support nutrition and physical activity in communities of color.

And with your help, we can do more:

We are asking for your support to help us:
o Fund academic scholarships
o Pilot a Summer Food Vending Truck
o Update and create an e-book of our Super Manual
o Develop a career pipeline for youth interested in Good Food and Built Environment jobs
o Launch our Community Food Coach social media platform

Please consider donating now to help us deepen and broaden our on-going work.

Other Ways You Can Help
If you can’t back CANFIT financially, you can still play a vital role by telling your friends and colleagues about our work, volunteering to host a fund-raising house party for us, and/or sharing our 20th Anniversary video with everyone you know – on your web site, on your blog, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+ - and all other social media platforms.  It is only with all of us working together that we can make CANFIT’s vision a reality. 

We appreciate your support and look forward to the opportunity to continue our work in the coming years.

What:

CANFIT’s Appeal

When:

December 16 2014

E-mail:

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