Community ‐ Based After School Programs and Youth Physical

Background At the request of Redwood City partners and with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Salud America! initiative, the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities (JGC) at Stanford University undertook an analysis examining the extent to which after school program participation is associated with youth physical fitness outcomes using the Youth Data Archive (YDA). This research occurred in tandem with the launch of Redwood City 2020's wellness initiative, which aligns with the newly unveiled federal Let's Move! campaign, championed by First Lady Michelle Obama and backed by key federal agencies. Redwood City 2020 has adopted a set of four key goals to improve the wellness of young people in the community: (1) Increase easy everyday physical activity; (2) Make healthy food the easy, affordable and viable option; (3) Build social cohesion and maximize public spaces; and (4) Promote healthy practices in 2020 partner organizations so they serve as models for the community. The aim of Let's Move! is to eliminate childhood obesity within a generation and to promote physical activity, and access to and consumption of healthy food. The initiative also urges drawing on the community to promote health from within (Letʹs Move, 2010). In September 2010, the League of California Cities passed a resolution to support the tenets of Let's Move! with specific language related to each of the four Redwood City 2020 wellness goals (League of California Cities, 2010). An extensive body of medical research shows that specifically designed physical activity‐focused after school programming can lead to improvements in youth obesity and fitness outcomes (Ara et al. Medical research also shows that improvement in physical health occurs both through increased activity level and decreased time spent engaged in sedentary activities such as watching television, playing video games, or excessive snacking, which are associated with increased obesity (Gortmaker et al. However, the targeted anti‐obesity programs on which these studies were based tended to be small, highly focused, and time‐limited rather than the community‐designed and led programs. As such, they tend to lack scalability and sustainability, which are critical for addressing this pervasive problem. The literature on the effectiveness of after school programs more broadly highlights four key areas of adolescent development that after school programming can influence, including physical health (Eccles & Gootman, 2002).