Healthy Eating Active Communities (HEAC)

In 2005, the Healthy Eating Active Communities (HEAC) program was launched by The California Endowment (TCE) (Cheadle et al., 2010). This program was guided by a comprehensive logic model, and the goal of HEAC was to indicate that disparities related to obese people and diabetes can be decreased in community level by providing affordable and accessible methods for healthy eating and physical activity to families in communities (Hinkle & Yoshida, 2014). HEAC assisted diverse communities to create environmental and policy changes to obtain more access to healthy food and physical activity among children and families. The strength of HEAC has been investigated by many studies. Firstly, in community level, HEAC offered physical education during the school day. Secondly, this program improved neighborhood streets and local parks to encourage physical activity and improve after-school

One of them was that the risk of losses in revenue that may result from changes in policies, many community stores were removed to improved neighborhood streets and local parks. Another weakness of HEAC was that this program increased the burden of governments, communities and schools because a lot of time and funding were required to implement this program, such as physical education and physical activity program in schools and community level (Samuels et al., 2010). HEAC was an effective program which led to the improvement of physical activity environments and the increase of physical education class time. An assessments of student activity levels found that HEAC can motivate students to take much more after-school physical activity (Samuels et al., 2010). Moreover, student survey findings showed that HEAC inspired students to engage in more healthy behaviors both in and outside of school than they were before the program’s implementation (Woodward-Lopez, Madsen, Crawford, & Gosliner,