Your AAP Donations Help Kids Embrace Healthy Activities

From tablets to smart phones to gaming systems, many children are anchored to being indoors. Growing attached to these addictive habits can hamper healthy lifestyles for children. Finding opportunities to get kids engaged with outdoor activities is important for keeping young people healthy. Your AAP donations helped develop concrete plans to make that happen.

The Taking it Outside: Nature & Child Health Convening project aims to keep children more active and therefore healthier by promoting outdoor activity. The Friends of Children-funded project intends to reverse the trends of chronic disease and mental illness due to a lack of physical and social activity. By limiting screen time and providing safe outdoor spaces, this project seeks to have more children experience nature in a meaningful way.

The AAP recently convened a virtual strategic planning meeting on the topic. The meeting served as a forum to involve a broader group of AAP members in the planning process and set the stage for future activities. Ideas generated during the meeting were streamlined into a single action plan.

During the next several years, the project will seek to raise awareness of the benefits of time in nature, expand access to natural settings for every child, and increase children’s participation and engagement in nature experiences. It will also strengthen public commitment to environmental justice and climate resilience and partner with local communities to preserve, enhance, and expand natural settings.

“A fine assembly of genuinely engaged colleagues who, together, conceived many useful and important objectives, recommendations, partners and possibilities,” noted one participant.

Because of you, this project has an exciting and long future ahead. Those dynamic beginnings occurred because of your gifts. AAP donors helped start an initiative that could create important changes with a deep, lasting impact. Thank you for being part of that.

I look forward to sharing more of the good work that comes to life through your generous AAP donations. It means so much for kids, their families, and pediatricians.

To learn about ways you can create a healthier future for children through a gift in your estate plan or with a beneficiary designation while leaving a lasting legacy that comes from the heart, contact Jill Taylor at 630/626-6033 or jtaylor@aap.org.