Health unit officials received a shock late last week, as the province injected more than a million dollars into a local kids health program.
Super Kids CK will receive $1.1 million over four years. Dr. April Rietdyk, director of the Chatham-Kent Public Health Unit, said the province put out a call to municipalities early in the year, but then the plan seemed to hit a wall.
“A provincial challenge came out for municipalities to form community coalitions to submit proposals for healthy kids community challenges. We only had four weeks in turnaround time,” she said. “Then with the upheaval of the government with the election, everything just disappeared.”
After three months of silence on the subject, the provincial government doled out its surprise news late last week.
“I was shocked when I learned of it. All that hard work we did to pull it together. And now there is al sorts of fun stuff we can do for our kids in the community,” Rietdyk said.
Chatham-Kent is one of 45 municipalities across the province to receive funding for the childhood anti-obesity programs.
Rietdyk said the communities will focus on encouraging kids to eat healthy, take part in physical activity and get enough sleep.
“For a nine month block of time, the entire province will focus on some key messages. They will be one of those three,” she said.
Locally, the plan is to deliver the messages and develop programs at the grass roots level. Rietdyk said that should stretch the provincial dollars further.
“We’ve got some exciting events in the works, such as campouts for kids, time to play – we want to get everyone out playing at the same time,” she said.
Rietdyk said the plans will continue to evolve over the course of the program. But the next steps will be to bring the community groups that took part in the planning back together to go through the project outline and timelines.
“When we learn (from the province) that first theme, we’ll look at all our activities to pick what will support that theme,” Rietdyk said.
The events won’t be held only in urban parts of Chatham-Kent either.
“We really stressed the ruralness of Chatham-Kent. We want to ensure we get out there to meet the needs of all our families,” Rietdyk said. “Some of our smaller communities deserve to have some fun for the kids too.”
