Live Healthy Appalachia (LHA) is a non-profit organization in Southeastern Ohio that exists to promote healthy eating and active living through educational programs and community partnerships. Aware of the critical impact of providing the educational component at a young age, LHA designed and implemented a community–based early intervention program to improve nutritional knowledge, have students make simple recipes that will enable them to taste healthier foods, and introduce active lifestyle habits to support the obesity prevention efforts in the region. 

Since it’s inception the program has been time-tested in more than 200 classrooms and has provided this experience to more than 4,000 children. In the 2018-19 school year the program was in over 50 classrooms and taught the curriculum to over 800 students.

In planning for expansion, LHA sees the need to make the curriculum accessible in a virtual format to make program more appealing to a greater number of classrooms. This can be accomplished by having our lessons on videos that are animated, to peak students’ interest. This also gives LHA a second option for schools in addition to having the sessions taught by our food educators, in-person, as we have been doing in the past.

Funding would help support the creation of three education animated videos to be used in programming.