Joel’s CAP Paper on Childhood Obesity

Joel’s paper for the Center for American Progress, “Cutting Fat with Coordination,” makes several recommendations for coordinating the complex maze of government programs and activities that could help reduce childhood obesity in the U.S.

An excerpt from the paper:

“First Lady Michelle Obama recently unveiled the nationwide Let’s Move campaign that aims to reduce childhood obesity. Its goal is ambitious. Let’s Move strives to ensure that within one generation the one-third born today who now become obese will instead reach adulthood at a healthy weight.

The Let’s Move campaign believes it can reach its goal of eliminating childhood obesity by advancing four different priorities: helping parents make healthy family choices; serving healthier food in schools; expanding access to healthy, affordable food in all communities and neighborhoods, including low-income ones; and increasing physical activity.

What makes this initiative unique is that it requires interagency coordination. Government agencies typically operate in silos, so when a government policy falls under the jurisdiction of multiple agencies, the execution of such a policy presents a challenge to the normal patterns of coordination and communication.

Despite the challenge, the administration has already begun smart efforts to enlist a wide variety of federal agencies—sometimes working together and sometimes working on their own—to advance those priorities.

…

It isn’t always easy to surmount solidified agency jurisdictions. I worked during the Clinton administration with Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman who, with strong backing from the White House, launched a unique initiative that involved public-private partnerships and spanned various federal agencies. The Food Recovery and Gleaning Initiative increased the amount of excess wholesome food donated to feeding charities from restaurants, farms, cafeterias, and food manufacturers. The broader Community Food Security Initiative grew out of that effort and built partnerships between the federal government and nonprofit groups, businesses, and communities to reduce hunger and increase local food self-reliance. I also worked on cross-agency initiatives to promote the AmeriCorps national service program and boost volunteerism.

While coordinating the Community Food Security initiative, I learned that at least five different USDA agencies had responsibility for fostering farmers markets in the Department of Agriculture alone. Many employees from the varied agencies working on farmers markets had never even met each other, much less worked together collaboratively. But we began to improve how they jointly carried out their missions by starting to bring them together for common purpose in a joint task force that produced a comprehensive community food security action plan that included specific roles for all the relevant agencies.

Government-wide operations may be complex, but they are not impossible.”

Read the full paper by clicking here.