|
Children's Summit Hopes to Create Unified Vision for the Region A huge, community wide work session surrounding children's issues took place at the Contemporary Resort. It's called the Children's Summit, and the goal is to create a community vision for the health and welfare of Central Florida's children. The Children’s Summit isn’t about creating new inner city youth initiatives or exercise programs. It’s about figuring out how to make this a community in which children thrive. It’s bringing together hundreds of local leaders, national experts, health professionals and child advocates to create a common agenda for improving the lives of children. United Way Children’s Services Assistant Vice President Ray Larson says this really is a new approach. “What we want to do is take many of the great things that are happening now, and help to align them so that they’re not just successful and have impact in an isolated way, but have what we call impact, we want to help all the children, we want to support all the children in our community, so how do we start moving towards that goal and really start having population level results,” he says. Larson says activity levels among kids will get a lot of attention during the summit, as will diet and nutrition. He says the summit is happening because the community is beginning to move out of survival mode and so can focus more on building a comprehensive plan for children’s health and well-being. |
|