The F.U.N. Initiative

The Fitness, Unity, Nutrition, or FUN, initiative was developed with the aim to bring the whole community together to create healthier lifestyle habits. As part of this initiative, Garfield received "Get Up and Go" funding with the "Newspaper in Education" project of the daily Bergen County newspaper, The Record.

"Get Up and Go" is an eight-part series of activities incorporating math, science, language arts and other subjects that teachers can use in their classrooms to teach students how to safely walk to school. Kids write stories about their walks to school or calculate their carbon footprints, that is, their personal impact on the environment.

Another component of this initiative is focused on the safe routes to school program. Facets of this program include:
*Walking clubs at elementary schools where kids walk during the school day and engage in special projects such as holiday food drives.
• Walking school buses once a month where parent volunteer "walking bus drivers" stop at the houses of some 100 kids to pick them up and safely walk them in a group to school.
• Walking events a couple of times a year that the schools publicize through e-mails home and flyers in students' backpacks including International Walk to School Day.

The overall mission of this initiative is to develop an active, healthy community. Goals of this initiative include increasing the number of children walking or biking to school, and developing opportunities for Garfield's children and families to be more physically active and eat more healthily.

Writings through the "Get Up and Go" series reached many more families than just those in Garfield: each edition went out as an insert in the newspaper to the 30,000 subscribers to The Record.

The safe routes to school initiative has been expanded to the local YMCA, where approximately 45 children in the YMCA's before-school program walk to school daily.