Back in March the Healthy Caribbean Coalition launched their Childhood Obesity Prevention Petition as part of their Civil Society Action Plan for 2017-2019.

The aim of the petition is to raise awareness of childhood obesity in the Caribbean and influence the region’s leaders to champion and implement critical policies that will improve the health of our children, reduce childhood obesity and prevent the associated non-communicable diseases.

Lake Health and Wellbeing fully supports this campaign and as a member of the HCC are assisting in promoting this campaign here in St Kitts. As part of this work we are working with volunteers from the St Kitts Department of Youth Empowerment’s Volunteer Corp to raise awareness of childhood obesity, encourage discussion on what our community can to do tackle this issue and gain support for the HCC’s petition.

Volunteers Come On Board

On 4^th June we were delighted to host a briefing session for our enthusiastic volunteers where we provided some background information on this topic and the HCC’s campaign as well as explored ways of reaching the community with the key messages of the campaign.

Over the next four weeks our volunteers will be out in the community targeting corporate organisations, schools, parents, young people and more to promote the childhood obesity prevention petition, raise awareness of the causes of childhood obesity and discuss the solutions with all stakeholders.

We’re aiming to use creative ways to engage the public on this issue and our volunteers have been hard at work on a podcast series on childhood obesity and we’re delighted to announce that their first episode has been published and you can listen to this here.  In this episode our volunteers introduce listeners to their new podcast series giving everyone a flavour of what is to come. You can support these wonderful young people by listening, sharing, commenting and sending in questions. You can send your comments and questions to info@lakehealthandwellbeing.com  or leave them in the comments section below the show notes of the podcast episode.

We’re very much looking forward to working with our volunteers, they’ve started really well and we’re sure they’ll make a significant difference in their community over the next few weeks.