CINCH Announcement

We are pleased to announce that CINCH received a grant from the Virginia Department of Health/Office of WIC and Nutrition Services CHAMPION Program to conduct BodyWorks classes throughout Hampton Roads. BodyWorks is a program designed to help parents and caregivers of adolescents and pre-adolescents improve family eating and activity habits. Available in English and Spanish, the program focuses on parents as role models and provides them with hands-on tools to make small, specific behavior changes to prevent obesity and help maintain a healthy weight. The BodyWorks program uses a train-the-trainer model to distribute the Toolkit through community-based organizations, state health agencies, non-profit organizations, health clinics, hospitals and health care systems. The program includes one six-hour training module for trainers and ten 90-minute weekly sessions for parents and caregivers.
The CINCH grant proposes to train two trainers in each city/town/county/health districts across Hampton Roads, for a total of 30 trainers. Each trainer will teach two 10-session classes (one in the fall and one in the spring) of 15 parents each. Funding is for one year. Our 5-year sustainability plan calls for a viral marketing effort. After year one, we will ask each trainer to continue for four more years, recruit two more trainers to teach two classes of 15 parents. We will work to continue this pattern of commitment in years two through four. If each trainer makes a commitment to this level of involvement, we will reach nearly a quarter of a million individuals with BodyWorks, thus creating a critical mass of families and trainers who better understand and practice healthy eating and activity. We expect this will also make a difference in our communities at the policy level as parents begin to expect more from themselves, their communities, and institutions with nutrition and physical activity availability.