CSCH is pleased to announce and congratulate the two awardees of our FY2017 seed grant competition. These grants provide funds to investigators to support projects that align with the vision of CSCH to promote an integrated approach to health and learning through collaborations across the components within the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model. They are intended for projects that can lead to innovative external grant applications. Eligible applicants are InCHIP members, with CSCH affiliation. Drs. Amy Mobley and Marlene Schwartz are the recipients of the $10,000 grants.

Dr. Amy Mobley, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Nutritional Sciences, and her co-investigators are studying the impact of local foods on elementary school students’ nutrition behaviors. The first phase of the project will determine the salient reasons that may motivate elementary school students’ to choose to eat local foods in their school. The second phase of the project will involve evaluating a local food procurement intervention on students’ nutrition health behaviors in low socioeconomic schools in Connecticut.

Dr. Marlene Schwartz is Director of the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity and Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies. She will be creating a WSCC Policy Assessment Tool that captures and scores all of the school policies relevant to the WSCC model. In creating this WSCC tool, she will follow the framework she used to create the already existing Wellness School Assessment Tool (www.WellSAT.org) that measures and scores the strength of school district wellness policies.

We wish to thank all of the applicants for their excellent proposals and the review committee members for their substantial contributions to the seed grant competitions.