The Camrose Wellness Coalition is all about helping people make healthier choices more often.
“Our goal is to create that social norm – that the healthy choice is the easy choice,” says Wellness Coalition member and registered dietitian, Pamela Boyson.
In particular, the Camrose Wellness Coalition – a 2017 Communities ChooseWell Developing Healthy Policies Award winner – wanted to create a healthy environment at the Camrose Recreation Centre, and to raise people’s awareness that healthier choices are not only tasty, but also easy and convenient.
“We are focusing on initiatives that are sustainable, and are putting our efforts into areas where we can have the most impact,” says Lucy Ernst, a community health promotion facilitator with Alberta Health Services and a Communities ChooseWell leader in Camrose. “People are healthier when the places where they live and work support good health.”
The Camrose Wellness Coalition wants to create an environment that supports good health for the long term. To this end, the coalition held a strategic planning session in 2017 to establish a clear direction for its efforts, and to identify short and long term goals in three priority areas: the built environment, the social environment and the natural environment.
In 2017, the Wellness Coalition focused a large part of its efforts on the built environment, where it had already been working with the City of Camrose to advocate for healthier food options – making healthy food available, affordable and accessible for all city recreational facility users.
Supported by the City of Camrose facilities director, Boyson worked with the concession operator on pricing and promotional strategies for healthier food items on the menu at the Camrose Recreation Centre.
To this end, the city drew up a new concession lease agreement, stating that a minimum of 30 per cent of menu items must meet Alberta Nutrition Guidelines. The Wellness Coalition evaluated the concession operator’s new menu to ensure they met those guidelines. In partnership with the University of Alberta (and as part of the Eat. Play. Live initiative supporting policy, system and environmental changes for health) the Wellness Coalition focused on the 4Ps of marketing:
Products, including everything from homemade soups and chili, to chicken wraps and grilled chicken burger;
Pricing, so that people would have more incentive to purchase the new healthier food items;
Promotion of the healthier food options;
Placement – for instance, placing a bowl of fresh fruit and homemade muffins at the cash register, to make healthy options more obvious and easier to access.
To encourage people to try the new healthier menu offerings, the Wellness Coalition is planning to organize a taste testing event this fall, to help kick off the next recreation season.
“Those healthier choices are going to make an impact over time,” Boyson says.
According to Boyson, everyone involved – the city, the concession operator and the Wellness Coalition – played a role in making this initiative successful. “We did it together,” she says. “The biggest win for us was in developing those relationships – letting them know, ‘We’re here for you and we want you to be successful.’ It really is a partnership. That building of trust was the crux of moving this forward.”
By Anna Holtby (2017)