Vision

Children grow up in environments that promote optimum health and children and their families are able to receive the coordinated care and services that they need to ensure that all children achieve their full potential.

Why Is Child and Youth Development a Critical Systems Issue?
The early years are a critical period of growth and development. Numerous studies have demonstrated that the experiences and environments to which children are exposed during their formative years play instrumental roles in shaping their futures. Positive and negative health, social, emotional, and economic consequences can often be predicted from exposures traced back to childhood. Current models of healthy childhood development support the need to address multiple domains—early care and education, social and emotional development, family support services, parent education, and health care—using a systems-based approach that involves the collaboration and partnership of multiple agencies and individuals. Altarum’s Center for Healthy Child and Youth Development aims to serve as a catalyst in promoting progress in healthy child development by operating simultaneously as a research center, technical assistance provider, policy advocate, and partner to organizations with similar goals.

What Are Our Core Strategies for Approaching This Work?
The Center will make strategic investments in partnerships and projects to examine, demonstrate, and support efforts designed to promote healthy children and youth. Our work will employ a socio-ecologic approach that addresses children; their families; the organizations that serve them; and the communities in which they live, work, and play. In partnership with other leading organizations, we will

• Develop and implement initiatives designed to evaluate, research, and assist efforts that seek to improve child, family, and systems outcomes related to healthy child and youth development;
• Leverage Center resources to enhance connections between the fields of child and youth development and childhood obesity prevention;
• Advocate for and disseminate systems change strategies at the organizational, local, state, and national levels; and
• Build new and sustainable infrastructure and capacities for Altarum Institute and its partners.

Why Is Altarum Uniquely Positioned to Do This Work?
The Institute’s work in early childhood systems-building initiatives dates back to the mid-1990s. Early work centered on providing technical assistance to a variety of initiatives funded through the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. Altarum’s efforts supported 112 Community Integrated Services grantees, the Healthy Child Care America initiative, and the Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems Initiative (ECCS). Together, these efforts involved work with leading national early childhood organizations and teams of expert practitioners in every state.

In 2008, Altarum invested $2.5 million over a 2-year period in its Childhood Obesity Prevention Mission Project (CHOMP). Through CHOMP, Altarum staff conducted five early childhood obesity prevention projects in nine states and Washington, D.C. These efforts focused on improving environments and policies related to early childhood education and care systems; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; and registry-based body mass index surveillance systems for monitoring the obesity epidemic in young children.

Current Initiatives and Partners

• Building a Healthier Future Summit—Partnership for a Healthier America. The Building a Healthier Future Summit is an inaugural event being hosted by the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), an independent, nonpartisan organization that was founded to work alongside First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! effort by facilitating meaningful action from the private sector, foundations, thought leaders, media, and communities to improve children’s health. The purpose of the event is to bring together key public and private thought leaders in order to garner and highlight private-sector commitments aimed at solving childhood obesity within a generation. The Center is partnering with PHA to organize, facilitate, and identify private commitments for the Early Childhood Track, which focuses on how vendors and distributors of everyday products and equipment can assist child care providers in their efforts to create healthy environments for children.

• Eat Well, Play Hard in Child Care Settings—New York State Department of Health. Based off of their best practice intervention, Eat Well, Play Hard in Child Care Settings, the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH) has launched the Eat Well, Play Hard Day Care Homes project, one of the first interventions in the country targeted specifically at preventing obesity in family daycare home environments. This project includes a 12-month intervention consisting of intensive provider group training, one-on-one, in-home provider training and technical assistance, and outreach to families. The goal of the project is to improve the nutrition and physical activity environments and practices of day care homes to support healthy child development and prevent the onset of childhood obesity. The Center is partnering with NYSDOH to conduct an evaluation of this project to assess behavioral and environmental outcomes as well as the potential for more widespread dissemination of this model.

• Health Promotion Initiatives—YMCA of the USA. YMCAs around the country are engaged in developing and implementing a variety of childhood obesity prevention and intervention initiatives. As these efforts proceed, there are many questions about how the experiences in one YMCA can inform others and how the YMCA of the USA (YUSA) can support and scale the interventions that are the most impactful and sustainable. The needs of the children and families who participate in these programs and the interests of YMCAs who are implementing them often pose challenges to dissemination efforts, which must maintain fidelity with evidence-based practices and curricula. Altarum is working with YUSA to evaluate the needs of YMCAs as they confront childhood obesity. The result will be the establishment of training and dissemination strategies and systems to most effectively implement, disseminate, and sustain prevention and intervention programs at the community level.

• Promoting Positive Parenting—National Association of County and City Health Officials. Promoting Positive Parenting (Triple P) is an evidence‐based system of interventions that enhance parental knowledge, skills, and confidence to prevent behavioral, emotional, and developmental problems in children. Triple P blankets the community with parenting and family‐support interventions designed to empower parents to raise their children in a safe, loving, and engaging environment. Triple P addresses five childhood developmental periods (infancy through adolescence) with five levels of intervention with increasing intensity. The Center will partner with the National Association of County and City Health Officials to evaluate a multiyear Triple P demonstration project that aims to develop appropriate models of implementation, including model practices, guidelines, and tools, to support the implementation of Triple P through federally qualified health center‐local health department partnerships.

Leadership    
The Center for Healthy Child and Youth Development is led by Lincoln Smith, Altarum President and CEO and Acting Director of the Center, and Karah Mantinan, M.P.H., R.D., Deputy Director of the Center. Ms. Mantinan is former manager of the Altarum Childhood Obesity Prevention Mission Project; and a Senior Associate in Policy, Planning, and Evaluation at Altarum where she manages research and evaluation projects that focus on community health, obesity prevention, early childhood, nutrition, and physical activity.

To learn more about the ongoing work of the center, please email karah.mantinan@altarum.org. For general information about Altarum, contact Jeff Moore at jeff.moore@altarum.org.