(Watertown, NY– March 14, 2013) Cornell Cooperative Extension is working to make the North Country a healthier place to live, work and play.
Our new initiative, Adopting Healthy Habits with Breastfeeding, is funded by the North Country Prenatal Perinatal Council and will help local businesses, groups, community leaders and organizations create policies, practices and environments to make breastfeeding the easy choice for families in Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence counties.
A healthy lifestyle for is about the choices we all make. Those choices, however, are shaped by the opportunities that surround us. Research demonstrates that people are more likely to engage in healthy behaviors, such as breastfeeding, when communities have spaces that make breastfeeding comfortable and convenient.
To this end, Adopting Healthy Habits will work with Cornell Cooperative Extension Associations in Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence Counties, as well as with concerned local organizations and individuals to build upon existing efforts and help identify and strategize ways to make changes that work for local communities.
Cornell Cooperative Extension of Jefferson County has $1,500 to fund 5-15 mini-grant awards to foster policy and environmental changes that support breastfeeding.
Specifically, these awards seek to support:
- Post-partum support strategies such as promoting adoption of the breastfeeding standards in Caring for Our Children: National Health and Safety Performance Standards: Guidelines for Out of Home Child Care.
- Health-care provider education strategies such as ensuring health care clinicians do not serve as advertisers for infant formula through educational efforts.
- Worksite strategies such as integrating innovative programs that provide solutions to the obstacles to breastfeeding that women face when returning to work.
- Community based strategies such as creating spaces that make breastfeeding comfortable and convenient.
- Community based strategies that create an atmosphere of breastfeeding as the normal method of infant feeding.
This funding is available to any group including social service providers, local businesses, faith-based groups, youth groups and neighborhoods. The goal is to make the choice to breastfeed an easy and convenient one through a change in practice or policy, removing barriers, or building access to healthy environments.
Adopting Healthy Habits hopes to work with applicants to assist all good ideas.
For more information about the mini awards call Amanda Root at Cornell Cooperative Extension Association of Jefferson County at 788-8450 or by emailing arr27@cornell.edu.