Family Connections » Healthy Connections

The Healthy Connections Initiative (HCI) is a center-wide plan to articulate and expand on our preventive health programming at our Portola and Excelsior sites. Healthy Connections focuses on four overarching areas of health: 1) Healthy Eating/Nutrition; 2) Physical Activity; 3) Disease Prevention; and 4) Mental Health/Stress Reduction.

The goal of the Healthy Connections Initiative is to ensure the greatest impact towards improving and sustaining the health and well being of families in San Francisco’s Portola neighborhood. The Healthy Connections Initiative is intended to:

• Create more public awareness of Family Connections preventative holistic health/family services.

• Help our families to better connect the dots:

o   Healthy eating/nutrition + exercise + disease prevention + good mental health =

o   Healthy Families =

o   Healthy Communities.

• Provide tools and strategies to facilitate holistic, sustainable changes for good nutrition, adequate physical activity, effective disease prevention, and sound mental health.

• Provide families with fun activities to engage and learn healthy alternatives.

• Engage parents and encourage them to be advocates for healthy living.

The initiative also includes an internal component to ensure that our organization and staff members are role models for healthy conduct. We believe it is imperative to practice what we teach.