Bronx Neighborhood Health Action Center: Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

The Bronx Action Center is one of the main lead partner of the Healthy Beverage Zone. The Action Center helps promotes and pledges to live a sugary beverage free lifestyle. The action center is currently being revitalized to use a holistic approach to primary care, have activated spaces for community organizing and planning, and connect residents to neighborhood-based social services- all under one roof. With having over fifty employees the Bronx Action Center did a thirty-day water challenge in attempt to encourage employees to drop sugary drinks in the work place for good. The challenge prompt the majority of the employees to sign the Healthy Beverage Zone pledge. In doing so, they made the activity fun and competitive for everyone in the work place. Poster boards were brought into the office and placed on every floor with each employee’s name who participated. Right off the bat they took the challenge as a competition amongst their coworkers in trying to win. The HBZ activity brought everyone in the workplace together by allowing them to comment with sticky notes on each poster board encouraging and motivating each other to strive to finish the thirty days! Once the winners were announced the leadership board put together a lunch in for everyone who participated. After the event, they also brought in table displays showing the number of grams of sugar in each soda and tea to help push workers to continue the challenge way after the competition and start to develop a healthy lifestyle routine.

The Bronx Action center calendar is always filled with events and meetings so, they know the importance in maintaining a strong leadership role for their community. While trying to encourage not only the staff but families and organizations they work with on a daily basis, they realized there was hesitation towards people wanting to drink New York City’s tap water. Due to the hesitance, they felt it was important to do a water sampling test to show the people In their community that all the waters from their sources in the Bronx are safe to drink. The taste water sampling test consisted of bottled, filtered, and tap water. The taste test really seemed to get people involved and interested in finding out the results. The results concluded that bottled water and filtered water won the taste test and were neck and neck. But after getting results from the laboratory all test concluded that all three types of water were equally safe to consume and it brought awareness and education to the majority of the Bronxites that were skeptical in drinking tap water. The Tremont Neighborhood Action center acknowledges the importance of brining awareness to the obesity crisis and emphasis its importance on educating the community to cut back on sugary drinks and show them how their families are being targeted by these sugary beverage companies. By providing the education, transparency, and making it fun the Bronx Action Center will continue to flip the Bronx community to live a healthier lifestyle!

By: Alexandra Batista