Tipping Off Schools and Businesses About Healthy Living

The information highway is already a challenge for some to navigate every day. The information from various mass media can be overwhelming for most people.

Corporate executive Patti Howell found herself among the overwhelmed population about 10 years ago, while working for Fortune 500 companies.

"I would get these health and wellness newsletters in my inbox everyday,” she said. “However, they were really lengthy so I would just pick and choose what was relevant to me at the time.”

This need for quick, bite-sized, easy-to-digest information led Howell to establish her wellness venture in 2002. Based in Calabasas, Health E-Tips provides up-to-date wellness information to corporations and schools around the US and even overseas.

For the weekly e-newsletter, Howell collates up-to-date and relevant information from various mainstream sources online. About 25 percent is original content that Howell and her staff put together.

Once a company pays the annual subscription fee, managers will have ready access to an e-library, which contains past newsletters, videos, and exercise routines, among others.

Companies have increasingly been turning to wellness tools to increase productivity, reduce absenteeism, raise morale and reduce healthcare costs, Howell said. 

Over 150 corporate clients subscribe to Health E-Tips including CIGNA Healthcare, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, Black & Decker, Sotheby’s and the Vanguard Group among them.

“I started noticing this increase in awareness more than a decade ago,” said Howell, explaining the trend.

It becomes even more attractive when health and wellness can be combined with corporate social responsibility.

“The corporate program funds the school program,” said Howell, explaining the tie-in. “The companies that we work with love hearing that they’re engaging with local schools from their offices.”

Locally, subscribes to the Just-A-Minute (JAM) school program, a free wellness resource for schools. “It’s a mirror image of the corporate program,” said Howell.

The free subscription gives schools access to a wealth of online resources including a one-minute exercise routine called the JAMmin’ Minute, a more extensive routine called the JAM Blast and a monthly health newsletter.

“It gets the students up and moving,” said Cindra Skotzko, a physical education specialist at Lupin Hill who recently filmed a pilot JAMmin’ Minute routine with a fourth grade class.

The video has been viewed, emulated and incorporated into the P.E. routines of all grade levels at the school.

Skotzko has set her sights beyond P.E. “I also want to empower the teachers so they can use the videos inside the classroom as they see fit,” she said.

Recently, First Lady Michelle Obama celebrated the first anniversary of her Let’s Move campaign at an elementary school in Atlanta, Georgia by JAMmin’ with second-graders. The school had previously incorporated the JAM program into its wellness initiatives.

The JAM program now reaches over 7 million children in 150,000 schools around the US.  “It’s gone viral,” said Howell, noting that the school program is now in all 50 states.

It has recently gone global with schools in Sweden, Ireland, Iran, Australia, China and the United Kingdom utilizing the e-newsletters and incorporating the one-minute routines in their P.E. programs.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education, public health departments and nonprofit organizations such as the American Heart Association have also started subscribing.

“We’ve learned that parents get engaged through their children and some of them bring it to the workplace or to their social groups,” said Howell, explaining the rapid growth of the concept.

Looking forward, Howell just wants to keep inspiring people and get them moving one step at a time. “Or make that one minute at a time,” she said.