The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center to Prevent Childhood Obesity is a national institution focused solely on the epidemic that threatens our country’s children and adolescents – and on the actions needed to reverse it by 2015.

The RWJF Center provides expertise and support to organizations, policymakers, and communities. It aims to help shape and coordinate these groups’ efforts and build a nationwide movement to solve this critical health issue. The Center is based in Little Rock at the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement (ACHI), which works in strategic partnership with PolicyLink.
Specifically, the center aims to:

• Synthesize the science and best available evidence to ensure that obesity prevention policies and activities are built on what works.
  
• Educate policymakers and advocates about the national, state, regional, and local policies that are most effective for preventing childhood obesity, with an emphasis on the needs of those communities most severely impacted by the epidemic.
  
• Develop capacity and leadership in the movement to prevent childhood obesity, in part by reaching out to other constituencies to expand the field.
  
• Advance effective communications strategies to increase public awareness and public will to turn the epidemic around.

The center is led by ACHI Director Joseph W. Thompson, MD, MPH, a pediatrician who is also Arkansas state surgeon general and an associate professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. In 2003, he and ACHI were instrumental in passage of the nation’s first legislatively mandated program to address childhood obesity through comprehensive changes in a state’s public schools.

ACHI collaborates with PolicyLink, whose founder and chief executive officer Angela Glover Blackwell provides national leadership and advocacy to improve health and well-being in low-income communities and communities of color.

The center was established with a $20 million commitment from RWJF, the country’s largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to improving the health and health care of all Americans.

Learn more at http://www.reversechildhoodobesity.org.