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Vision

Coordinator and class

HealthCorps®, a proactive health movement founded by heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, is fighting the obesity and mental resilience crisis by getting American students and communities across the country to take charge of their health.  Our three priorities are: 

  1. Educating the Student Body– our in-school program to empower and educate youth and faculty about their bodies, their environments and their abilities to affect them.
     

Like a Peace Corps for Health, HealthCorps is a national service and peer mentoring initiative. In high schools, HealthCorps “Coordinators” empower teens in underserved populations to make simple lifestyle changes to enhance their well-being and resilience and take the message to friends, families and neighbors.

Recent college graduates become HealthCorps "Coordinators" for two years and defer medical school or graduate health program studies to peer-mentor as public service - helping teens, their teachers and their families become health activists through:

  • Our fun, experiential curriculum, developed with leading health and integrative medicine experts; Nutrition, Fitness and Mental Resilience in-school seminars and after school clubs.
  • Pedometer contests for students and teachers
  • Tools to create educated consumers:  food label, portion and ingredient label deciphering
  • Tools to build mental resilience: stress reducers, self esteem and hope builders
  • Practical exercise like walking, yoga and simple strength building routines
  • Service learning projects to teach other students HealthCorps lessons
  • Field trips to organic farms, hospitals, museums
  • Teen Iron Chef cooking lessons and competitions
  • Parent’s Nights

 

  1. Creating a FitTown– Our community outreach to connect and empower citizens and organizations to bring about awareness and affect change through community based projects and events such as:
     
  • Our photovoice projects to explore and document community life
  • Built-environment improvements
  • Highway to Health Fair & Festivals

 

HealthCorps Coordinators form important ties with public health departments, school systems, community foundations, the business community, city food banks and other community service organizations to coalesce efforts.  FitTown efforts are guided by key tools developed by the Center for Disease controls: the School Health Index (SHI) and the Community Health Index (CHI).

  1. Advocacy: Our public outreach at the national, state and city levels to:

 

  • Advocate for policy shifts that put health and physical education back into the core curriculum for the American education system;
  • Advocate for policy shifts that move us towards safer environments affecting health (food systems, transportation systems, public space design systems, more nature) that encourage and enable people to be more physically active.

 

Stories of hardship, resolution and triumph reach HealthCorps every day.