A look back in time/20 Year Anniversary

July 17, 2010 was Project Fit America’s birthday and the start of a year-long celebration of our 20 Year Anniversary! When PFA started I had one rotary dial telephone, rocket red like the “Batman Phone”, one typewriter, a used photocopy machine, a used fax machine and rolls of stamps.   The average American kid was overweight by 8.3 pounds and the medical community was just discovering that cardiovascular heart disease was not something you “got” when you become older, but begins to develop when you are young and manifests when you are older.   The idea of kids getting adult illnesses as kids was unthinkable and the depth of the downward spiral of America’s future health was hotly debated.

We had no crystal ball but it did not take much imagination to see the trend of obesity and sedentary lifestyles was only going to get worse and not better.   Early on we knew that funding PE programs, helping PE teachers and rewarding “Fitness Forward” principals with grants to improve their schools would make the difference in weather kids grew up healthy or out of shape.  Our goal was then and is still, 20 years later, “Fit Kids, One School At a Time.”

This charity began during the recession of 1990 when the first Bush Administration had coined the word “recession”…we are not in a depression, we are in a recession.  The nation was in the first Gulf War and corporate America was experiencing massive layoffs and job losses.  That is why we chose hospitals to target as our donors, we felt they would be “recession proof” and also have the greatest passion for childhood intervention for cardiovascular heart health with all the emerging new studies on heart disease.   It was a gamble that paid off and by 1991 we had schools in over 15 states that hospitals had funded for the Project Fit America program.   Since that time over $9,000,000 has been raised resulting in grant funding for over 750 schools in 300 cities and 40 states.  To this day hospitals continue to be our champion and we have hospitals that have been implementing this program for over a decade.  From their sponsorship we have been able to go to all kinds on communities from rural, to urban and every place in between and found every time…..kids are the same…hungry to be told what to do and excited to be shown how to be active.  It is child’s nature to run, be active and play.   They learn to be sedentary.  It is not their nature.   When a PE teacher has innovation and a multitude of ways to “hook” their kids and challenge them…the turn around is nothing short of amazing.  There are approximately 100,000 k-8 schools in America and it took us two decades to reach about 7% of them.

No fair guessing how motivated and inspired we are to triple and quadruple those numbers over the next decade.   Only this time we have something we never had before….a state wide program that gave us access to over 100 schools, all at once, and a sponsor, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Mississippi Foundation,  who asked us to have the schools track and measure BMI.  Now everyone involved understands all to well BMI is not a perfect tool of measurement for kids as they are growing and changing by leaps and bounds…but the trends we saw in the reduction of obesity in these schools is something to write about!There were over 97 schools that reported in with their results….30+ schools had their childhood obesity numbers reduce by more than 8% or more.

One of my Board Members asked me at our annual meeting in April 2010,  “Why are you not promoting all the work you have done over the past 20 years?”….I said “It felt like bragging about me and this charity is so not about me…it is about the kids and teachers.”  His response was….”To quote Reggie Jackson…It ain’t bragging if you did it!”

Okay, so I fess up…I did it! I helped hundreds of schools and thousands of kids!  But not one accomplishment can I claim as my own as it is the spirit of those teachers who made the difference.  I may be the one that found the funds…they are the ones who put them to good use!

Truly not much has changed in 20 years.  There is so much more technology that runs circles around my “Batman Phone”…..but we still drag the sled across America day in and day out looking for those Principals who support their PE Teachers that, rain or shine,  are determined to make sure their kids do not just become smarter as a result of coming to school….but healthier too.  It is and always will be….Fit kids, one school at a time!!!