Campaign Overview

ABOUT THE CAMPAIGN

Food, Inc., the Academy Award®-nominated documentary by Robert Kenner, lifts the veil on America’s highly mechanized, corporate-controlled food industry. The film reveals an inadequately regulated system that has contributed significantly to escalating rates of obesity and other serious health problems. Through compelling personal narratives and interviews with food policy experts, Food, Inc. exposes an industry that is an increasing threat to the health of consumers, the safety of workers and the future of the environment.

With funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Participant Media and Active Voice are running the Ingredients for Change Campaign, a year-long initiative consisting of a series of community engagement screenings and events in lower-income areas throughout the country with a lack of access to nutritional foods and disproportionately high rates of obesity and other diet-related health problems.

A panel of local farmers, food advocates, and a youth leader address a packed house in November 2009 in Fresno, CA at the first screening event of the IFC Campaign, which was organized by the Central California Regional Obesity Prevention Coalition.

OPPORTUNITIES AND OBJECTIVES

The Ingredients for Change Campaign is:

• Galvanizing local stakeholders and building coalitions to help reverse the obesity epidemic, particularly childhood obesity rates, through environmental and policy change.
• Raising awareness and engaging the public by giving parents, educators and others the information and tools to advocate for improved access to affordable healthy foods and strengthened food regulation.
• Educating local policy-makers about obesity-prevention actions they can take in their communities.
• Sharing promising and successful strategies across communities and states.
  
  

Two middle school girls from the Old South Baton Rouge (LA) neighborhood deliberate whether or not the cabbages in the community garden they helped create are ready to harvest.

PROJECT ACTIVITIES

• 30 community-engagement screenings nationwide in lower-income areas that suffer from high obesity rates and inadequate access to healthy food. Organized in conjunction with local advocacy organizations, the screenings are accompanied by panel discussions and facilitated community dialogues.
• Planning with community-based organizations to identify local food and public health advocacy priorities such as healthier school menus, greater access to nutritious foods or menu labeling.
• Action and resource guides in English and Spanish to help facilitate conversations and mobilize communities.
• An Ingredients for Change peer-learning network to share best practices and sustain long-term advocacy efforts at local and state levels, captured in a quarterly newsletter, a blog and user-generated content.