Columbus Day Event Discusses Increasing Access to Healthy Physical Activity for Urban Youth

Forum Provided Opportunity for Community Engagement.
Boston Mayoral candidates Marty Walsh and John Connolly agreed to speak separately on the topic of increasing both structured and informal, neighborhood based opportunities for urban youth to engage in healthy physical activity. They met the community in back-to-back addresses at Sportsmen’s Tennis & Enrichment Center in Dorchester on October 14th, Columbus Day. The Mayoral Conversation, “Active Youth, Healthy Communities,” provided each candidate with an opportunity to briefly outline their respective strategies before opening up the floor to questions from youth, parents, community leaders and sports-based youth development organizations.

A Challenge that Continues To Haunt the City of Boston
In June of 2009, The Boston Globe started a community-wide dialogue with a 7 part series entitled ‘Failing our Athletes.’ It exposed the woefully inadequate opportunities provided to Boston’s young athletes: children sharing sweaty uniforms, practicing in hallways and in parks laced with feces, or worse yet, dodging spent needles and flying bullets as they prepared in what was purported to be an even test of athleticism against suburban schools.

At least partially in response to the Globe series, Mayor Menino soon announced the creation of a multi-million dollar foundation aimed at improving Boston’s high school athletic system. Yet two years later, The Boston Foundation and the New England Health Care Institute released its Healthy People Healthy Economies 2011 Report Card, in which they reported that Massachusetts was found to have the worst score in the country for physical activity among high school students, earning the state a “D” for youth physical activity.

None of this should have come as a surprise. As far back as ten years ago, the Harvard School of Public Health Play Across Boston Research Project concluded that Boston’s predominantly low-income and minority neighborhoods were dramatically underserved relative to recreational facilities compared to other neighborhoods. Clearly, the next Mayor of Boston will have to bring new energy and creativity to an old issue, the impact of which far exceeds our youth’s ability to compete on the court or in the fields.

A Lifelong Impact
The reality is that the persistent and pervasive lack of opportunities for organized physical activity inside and outside of school has created a generation in which juvenile obesity, and resulting preventable maladies, such as juvenile diabetes, are running rampant in Boston’s inner city communities. Just two months prior to the Boston Globe article on high school sports, a Boston.Com article reported that 1 in 4 Boston 4 year-olds were considered obese.

Sportsmen’s Tennis & Enrichment Center invited the two candidates vying to be the next Mayor of Boston to share how they plan to address the broader set of factors which conflate to create this pervasive health crisis in Boston neighborhoods including:

* Chronically unsafe neighborhoods;
* Limited access to organized school sports across all grade levels and communities; and
* Limited access to opportunities for informal physical activities in most neighborhoods.