BCHD makes bid to become Vitality City
The Beach Cities Health District is considering committing as much as $1.8 million over three years towards implementing the Vitality Cities program, an amount that would potentially be matched with $3.5 million by Healthways Inc., the organization behind the cutting-edge public health campaign.
The BCHD board of directors held a special meeting last week to consider the financial component of becoming a Vitality City.
“Our board is looking at what this would mean for us – what our investment would be,” said Susan Burden, BCHD’s CEO. “Everyone knows there are several key wins in this. The big one is we are always hungry to be better at what we do, and have more measurable results.”
Vitality City is a nationally recognized program that grew from bestselling author Dan Buettner’s National Geographic-backed “Blue Zone” study of lifestyles regions throughout the world with the longest life expectancies. The program takes nine principles derived from the study – including dietary and physical activity habits – and applies them to public health.
A Vitality City pilot program was conducted last year in Albert Lea, Minnesota, a city of 18,000 residents. In just 10 months, the 2,300 residents who participated in the program lost an average of 2.6 pounds and increased their life expectancy by 3.1 years. Absenteeism among city and school employees dropped 20 percent. The program is currently seeking to expand and create a template that can be applied to cities throughout the country.
The health district began its Vitality City bid in May. The Healthways’ Blue Zone Vitality City program has since narrowed its nationwide search to three areas: the Beach Cities, Asheville, North Carolina, and a cluster of Central Florida cities that include Maitland, Winter Park and College Park.
Buettner, in a visit to Redondo Beach in May, said that Albert Lea’s success wasn’t brought about by citizens individually deciding to change their lifestyles. Vitality City worked with the city to build more bike and pedestrian paths, with schools to implement healthier eating choices for students, and with area restaurants to revamp menus.
“What works is permanent changes in the environment,” Buettner said. “That is the principal behind this project.”
As part of its application, BCHD obtained letters of support from Beach Cities’ municipalities, school districts, and businesses. But now the health district must determine its level of financial commitment.
BCHD board president Vanessa Poster said the board’s investment is contingent on obtaining clear results from the program.
“We are very specific as a board on this,” Poster said. “If this is something we are going to do, we want measurable results. We also want to be clear on what our goals are, our objectives, and whether or not we’ll know in three years if we accomplish them.”
The board initially committed $1 million over the course of the three year program. Healthways sought a $2.5 million commitment – which it would match with $3.5 million – and the board indicated at a board meeting on Aug. 24 that as much as $1.8 million could be allocated.
Poster stressed that the money would come from the health district’s reserves.
“We are not taking any money from any current projects,” she said. “We are taking money from our reserves. We don’t expect this to impact our annual budget.”
BCHD has an annual operating budget of $10 million and $39 million in reserves.
Burden characterized ongoing conversations as “fluid” but noted that whatever investment BCHD made would bring very tangible assets in return, specifically access to a public health polling instrument that Gallup Polls – a Vitality City partner – spent more than $25 million developing. She noted the successes BCHD has had with its own, much smaller scale programs that are similar to Vitality City, such as the LiveWell Kids program — which has achieved a reduction in Redondo Beach students’ average Body Mass Index through nutrition education, group exercise, and shared public gardens.
“This is huge compared to that,” Burden said. “We know LiveWell Kids is worth its weight in gold because we have the numbers to prove it, and this would be on a much larger scale for us….The real win at the end of the day is that we can show our community’s health has shifted in a positive direction. That is why we exist. That is the big win.”
Burden also said that some of the details being discussed are not financial, but rather what other public agencies in the community could be expected to do – such as cities agreeing to more pedestrian and bike-friendly components in public works projects in which funds have already been allocated.
Poster said that no final decisions have been made and encouraged more public involvement at upcoming BCHD meetings. But she also said the possibility of the area becoming a Vitality City is tremendously exciting because the program has been able to achieve that most elusive thing in public health – achieving measurable progress in improving a community’s overall health and happiness.
“The other program has actually seen happiness ratings increase because of health status,” Poster said. “The applications for that kind of thing are infinite – for productivity, for tourism, for all sorts of other things. It’s huge and very exciting….It feels to me like one of the most important things I’ve done on the board, and I’ve been on the board 14 years.” ER