About

The Early Childhood (EC) Work Group convenes a multi-disciplinary network of practitioners, researchers, and advocates focused on policy, systems, and environmental approaches to improve nutrition and promote healthy development in the places where young children live, learn, and play. The objective of the EC Work Group is to provide a platform for networking, information sharing, and collaboration that will increase the quality, effectiveness, and reach of nutrition promotion and early childhood obesity prevention research, policy, and practice. Priority areas for the EC Work Group are: 1) Improving the health and wellbeing of young children from marginalized communities including racial/ethnic minority populations at highest risk for low diet quality and/or obesity; and 2) Encouraging collaboration and resource sharing to expand the use of scientifically-sound methods to evaluate nutrition promotion and obesity prevention initiatives. 

We invite all who are interested to join our listserv and attend our regular webinars. We additionally have several active sub-groups that work on specific projects on topics related to early childhood. Below is a description of each of these groups and the main contacts if you are interested in learning more.

EC-COVID-19: Their goal is to better understand the impact that COVID-19 has had on young children’s access to food, in particular those children that attend early childcare settings that are participating in CACFP. 

BMI & Head Start: Their goal is to better understand how height and weight data is collected and communicated to parents in Head Start.

SNAP-Ed: This group discusses ongoing SNAP-ED outreach programs and policy updates that are relevant for early childhood education settings

ECE Workforce Wellbeing: The goal of this group is to collaborate on research and interventions focusing on understanding and improving the health status of the ECE workforce

Developing and implementing m-health in the ECE setting: Their goal is to cultivate a community of research and practice around m-health in the ECE setting. 

Download the EC Overview document for more information about the work group.

Download the article ‘Best Practices for Collaboration in Research’ by Lucy Delgadillo, Utah State University, for more information on the Learning Collaborative model.

Sub-groups

For sub-group contact information, please click here. 

Contact Us

To join the Early Childhood Listserv, please click the button below and fill out the form with your contact information.

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