The St. Elizabeth Foundation has received a $25,000 grant from Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America to support the My Heart RocksTM children’s school program. My Heart RocksTM mission is to increase overall awareness of cardiovascular disease and obesity to the youth in communities St. Elizabeth serves and to educate them on heart- healthy lifestyles.
At the beginning of the 2014-15 school year, St. Elizabeth launched the major health education program piloted in the Kenton County School District. The program was developed and partially funded by donations and charitable gifts from community partners such as Toyota.
“Education continues to be a high priority for Toyota,” says Carri Chandler, External Affairs, Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America. “This health and wellness initiative is an ideal example of collaboration with community partners to increase student interest in developing their academic skills and health consciousness.”
In conjunction with the St. Elizabeth CardioVascular Mobile Health Unit, nurses and other clinical staff offer wellness fairs that educate elementary school children about improved lifestyle choices related to exercise, nutrition, and heart disease with a goal of decreasing their chances for obesity and cardiovascular illness later in life. Students are also given a packet of information to take home and share with their family.
Working in collaboration with educators, curriculum coordinators, and teachers from the Kenton County School system, My Heart RocksTM has the potential to reach more than 1,000 students in the first year. As funding allows, the program will expand to other schools in the region. If children learn healthy behaviors and develop healthy habits, they will most likely continue these behaviors in adulthood.
Health and wellness fairs feature hundreds of students moving from one station to the other learning about tasty and healthy foods, fun ways to get more exercise with their friends and family, looking at an oversized 3-D model of a heart and discovering how it works, understanding how smoking can damage their heart and lungs, studying about sugary drinks and the negative impact on their body, and learning to recognize symptoms of a heart attack (and how to call for help) if they encounter that situation at home.
This initiative supports the larger St. Elizabeth Heart & Vascular Institute’s goal of reducing heart-related deaths in Northern Kentucky by 25% by 2025.
From St. Elizabeth Hospital