What’s happening with the White House Conference?
Unless you are deeply involved in its planning, which I am not, it’s hard to know what’s going on with the planned-for-September (date not yet set) White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health.
The official information about the conference is on the Health.gov website. Its goal:
End hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.
Its pillars:
White House Conference Pillars
- Improve food access and affordability: End hunger by making it easier for everyone — including urban, suburban, rural, and Tribal communities — to access and afford food. For example, expand eligibility for and increase participation in food assistance programs and improve transportation to places where food is available.
- Integrate nutrition and health: Prioritize the role of nutrition and food security in overall health, including disease prevention and management, and ensure that our health care system addresses the nutrition needs of all people.
- Empower all consumers to make and have access to healthy choices: Foster environments that enable all people to easily make informed healthy choices, increase access to healthy food, encourage healthy workplace and school policies, and invest in public messaging and education campaigns that are culturally appropriate and resonate with specific communities.
- Support physical activity for all: Make it easier for people to be more physically active (in part by ensuring that everyone has access to safe places to be active), increase awareness of the benefits of physical activity, and conduct research on and measure physical activity.
- Enhance nutrition and food security research: Improve nutrition metrics, data collection, and research to inform nutrition and food security policy, particularly on issues of equity, access, and disparities.
Here’s how you can weigh in: host your own session (explained in this press release.
- First, go to the Good Food Dialogues platform to get resources for doing this.
- Next, Download the Toolkit (this is in English but it also comes in Chinese, in Korean, in Vietnamese, and in Spanish)
Here are the questions for consideration:
- How has hunger or diet-related disease impacted you, your family, or your community?
- What specifc actions should the U.S. Federal government, including the Executive Branch and Congress, take to achieve each pillar? What are the opportunities and barriers to achieving the actions? (include specifc policy and/or program ideas as well as funding needs).
- What specifc actions should local, state, territory and Tribal governments; private companies; nonproft and community groups; and others take to achieve each pillar?
- What are opportunities for public- and private-sector partners to work together to achieve each pillar?
- What are innovative, successful activities already happening at the local, state, territory, and Tribal levels that could inform actions at the Federal level?
Tufts University is leading an effort to generate actionable recommendations to inform the conference. Its work is described here.
This is all I know at the moment. I went to the listening session at Gracie Mansion a couple of weeks ago but have not heard what, if anything, came out of it.
