Commonwealth Awards $165,000 Grant to MetroWest Moves

MetroWest Moves was awarded a $165,000 grant over the next three years from the Governor Patrick Administration.

The award is part of more than $1 million in Mass in Motion Municipal Wellness and Leadership grants awarded to 22 programs across the Commonwealth.

The grants are designed to promote opportunities for healthy eating and active living in the places people live, learn, work and play.

Mass in Motion is a program of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

“These grants enable cities and towns to make healthy eating and active living easier for people to achieve,” said Public Health Commissioner Cheryl Bartlett in a press release. “The grantees are working to make the healthy choice the easy choice by ensuring the availability of healthy affordable foods and promoting opportunities for physical activity.”

The grant funding will be used to assist Framingham, Hudson, Marlborough, and Northborough in creating and sustaining changes that make it easy for people to eat better and move more.

MetroWest Moves provides a unique opportunity to promote wellness and combat health disparities across these four diverse communities, reaching almost 140,000 people. Individually and as Mass in Motion collaboratives, Framingham, Hudson, Marlborough, and Northborough have engaged in efforts to implement health-promoting policies, organizational, and environmental changes to support healthy eating and active living.

The goal of MetroWest Moves is to implement strategies to increase healthy eating and active living and reduce risk factors associated with chronic disease and obesity for MetroWest residents.

With this new funding, the Building a Healthy Northborough Initiative will now join the MetroWest Moves Initiative. The two initiatives’ websites will be combined into www.metrowestmoves.org

“This funding will allow us to continue our work to make the region a healthier place to live and work,” said Sam Wong, Hudson’s Director of Public and Community Health Services.

Hudson Board of Health is the lead agency for MetroWest Moves.

The Mass in Motion Municipal Wellness and Leadership Initiative enables cities and towns in Massachusetts to implement local policy, systems and environmental change strategies to prevent and reduce obesity and the chronic diseases that result from being overweight.

Interventions will focus on healthy eating, active living, and promotion of healthy and safe physical environments. The initiative is led by municipalities with the creation of a multi-sector partnership to develop and implement the community-level strategies.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle that includes regular physical activity, and the consumption of healthy foods is important in maintaining a healthy weight and reducing the risk for chronic disease and associated risk factors, including hypertension, heart disease and stroke, diabetes and some cancers.

Through Mass in Motion, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health is working with cities and towns across the Commonwealth to create conditions that make it easier to be active and eat healthy food.