Charlotte S. Seidman

AJPM Childhood Obesity Challenge

In launching the Childhood Obesity Challenge, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, with the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has entered a new arena of online competitions with several goals: As a publisher of information that we anticipate will contribute to addressing the most pressing problems in prevention, we know that one of the most important current issues is combatting the childhood obesity epidemic that afflicts our country and much of the developed world. Game-changing interventions are required, and crowd-sourcing strategies are proving to be one of the fastest ways both to tap into promising innovations and to disseminate them. We are also entering this venture recognizing that scientific publishing itself is undergoing rapid innovation. By expanding our publication process to submissions beyond the traditional manuscript—to media not limited to the written page, submitted by authors both inside and outside academia, with solutions that may not have been incubated in multi-year studies—we hope to foster connections between innovators of diverse backgrounds and accelerate the development of their ideas. It is in this context that we introduce the 1st-place winner of Round 3 of the AJPM Childhood Obesity Challenge— Familias Activas y Saludables (Active and Healthy Families)—selected by our judging panel for best meeting the criteria of this round of the competition, which focused on interventions for children and their families delivered in clinical settings or involving partnerships between clinics and communities.