Voices for Healthy Kids — Building Healthier Futures for More Than a Decade
Voices for Healthy Kids — Building Healthier Futures for More Than a Decade
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Featuring Whitney Clausen
CNHI Project Manager
Healthy habits do not develop in a vacuum. The environments surrounding children, from schools and neighborhoods to community spaces, help shape opportunities for lifelong health. With more than 1 in 5 children and adolescents in the United States experiencing obesity, prevention efforts that create healthier environments remain as important as ever. Prevention begins long before a doctor’s visit. It starts in the places, policies, and systems that shape everyday opportunities for health.
Since 2013, Voices for Healthy Kids has worked to strengthen those opportunities by supporting policy and systems changes that help children and families thrive. As the Center for Nutrition & Health Impact’s (CNHI) work on the initiative officially concludes this June, we are reflecting on more than 13 years of partnership, evaluation, and learning that helped strengthen this national effort. The project’s longevity alone makes it unique. Few initiatives evolve over more than a decade, and even fewer provide opportunities to examine how advocacy, support systems, and public health priorities shift over time.
Launched in 2013 by the American Heart Association and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Voices for Healthy Kids has worked toward a vision where every child, regardless of background, income, or ZIP code, has the opportunity to thrive. Through support from advocates and communities, the initiative has advanced policy solutions related to healthy food access, physical activity, family wellbeing, and healthier environments for children and families.
Behind the scenes, CNHI has helped tell another part of the story: understanding what support policy advocacy organizations need and identifying the strategies, partnerships, and resources that help drive meaningful policy and systems change.
For the past 13 years, CNHI has served as an evaluation partner to Voices for Healthy Kids to better understand how technical assistance, advocacy support, and capacity building strengthen community impact and contribute to policy wins. Across the life of the partnership, the CNHI team developed 12 major reports and evaluation deliverables, documenting lessons learned and informing future improvements. Focus areas of CNHI’s evaluation work over the past 13 years included (1) characterizing and evaluating technical assistance and legal technical assistance provided to Voices for Healthy Kids grantees; (2) developing, refining, and implementation of tools to assess advocacy readiness and capacity among grantees; and (3) application of the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) framework to understand the reach and effectiveness of training and technical assistance provided to grantees.
Through these three main focus areas, CNHI engaged in more than 900 survey and interview touchpoints across project activities, gathering perspectives from grantees. As Whitney Clausen, Project Manager, reflected,
“One theme that consistently emerged over the years was how much grantees valued the expertise Voices for Healthy Kids brought to the policy advocacy space and the breadth of technical assistance available to support their work.”
Together, these efforts helped create a richer understanding of what communities need to build momentum, sustain change, and advance healthier futures for children and families.
Like the initiative itself, CNHI’s evaluation work evolved over time, creating opportunities to ask bigger questions and deepen its impact. Early efforts centered on understanding legal technical assistance and identifying the resources organizations needed to advance policy and systems change efforts. Those foundational years helped establish a clearer understanding of the support communities relied on and laid the groundwork for stronger, more responsive strategies moving forward.
By 2016, the work expanded beyond understanding support systems and into strengthening them. CNHI helped develop tools and measurement strategies designed to assess advocacy readiness and organizational capacity, drawing on interviews with advocacy experts, field testing with grantees, and mixed-methods research approaches. These efforts helped create a stronger understanding of how organizations build momentum and navigate complex policy environments.
As the initiative continued to evolve, so did the evaluation approach. Mid-course assessments and implementation frameworks, such as RE-AIM, shifted the focus from measuring activities and outputs to learning more about experiences, challenges, and long-term impact. More recent work has placed greater emphasis on qualitative insights and lived experiences, helping capture the perspectives of advocates, technical assistance providers, and community partners working directly on the ground. This approach became increasingly important as Voices for Healthy Kids transformed and expanded its support for grantees, creating new opportunities to better understand what organizations need not only to launch change, but to sustain it over time.
Speaking to the initiative’s ability to adapt over time, Clausen shared:
“Like many initiatives, Voices for Healthy Kids experienced moments that required change and adaptation. During COVID-19, technical assistance had to shift from in-person to virtual, almost overnight. But what stood out most was not just how the work changed; it was how Voices for Healthy Kids continually evolved to better meet the needs of grantees and the broader policy advocacy landscape while staying focused on supporting communities.”
Across all phases of the project, one lesson remained consistent. Sustainable prevention efforts require more than programs alone; they depend on partnerships, community insight, and environments that make healthier choices possible for communities over time.
For CNHI, Voices for Healthy Kids represents more than a long-running project. This project represents over a decade of listening, learning, and adapting alongside communities working to create healthier futures for children and families. Although CNHI’s work on the initiative formally concludes this summer, its impact continues through the partnerships built, lessons learned, and evaluation insights gained over the past 13 years. The work serves as a reminder that healthier futures are not built through programs alone. They are built through sustained partnerships, community-driven solutions, and environments that make healthy choices possible for generations to come.