Good to Grow!

Frequently Asked Questions
Download the a PDF

What is Good to Grow!?
Begun in 2006, Good to Grow! is the Association of Children's Museums' (ACM) health initiative to address the childhood obesity epidemic.

Why are children's museums promoting health?
Research shows that families are the most important factor in promoting children's health. Through formal surveys, ACM has found that families turn to children's museums for engaging activities, quality interactions and trustworthy information about child development and health.

What aspects of health will Good to Grow! address?
The four tenets of Good to Grow! are:

• Activate children and parents to choose healthy foods
• Increase physical activity
• Reduce screen time
• Nurture a lifelong connection to the outdoors

How is Good to Grow! helping to address the childhood obesity epidemic?
ACM is developing several Good to Grow! programs and resources for children's museums to use in their institution and community settings. Current offerings include the Growing Healthy Museums Program; Good to Grow! Web site and Kids Dig Dirt!.

Growing Healthy Museums Program
Funded through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Service in fall 2007, the program is designed to increase museums' institutional capacity, knowledge and skills in order to become leaders in promoting health and wellness in their communities. The program has four activities.

• Developing an institutional self-study and recognition program;
  
• Publishing a Good to Grow! Healthy Museum best practices book;
  
• Hosting a conference on building healthy community partnerships and producing a toolkit based on conference content and outcomes;
  
• Measuring the effectiveness of providing these resources to museum professionals while providing tools for museums to evaluate the effectiveness of these programs and practices for museum audiences.
  

Good to Grow! Web site
Funded by Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, the site launched in fall 2007. The Web site links the children's museum experience, home life and the broader community with compelling messages, engaging activities and accurate resources for living healthy lives. The site is intended to be co-branded with individual children's museums as an extension of their own Web site. Additionally, visitors that come to site independently can fine the closest children's museum to their home through a museum locator tool. A usage clock - one of the first of its kind - that helps users track just how much time they are spending on the site, with the idea that time awareness can bring about responsible usage. The site is geared for families with children ages 2-10 and the children's museums that serve them.

The site include four main areas:

• Family Fun, where families can plant a virtual Good to Grow! tree and help their tree sprout colorful stickers as reward for answering health discovery questions.
• Gallery, where families can see other virtual Good to Grow! trees, grouped by affiliated museum.
• Grown-up Stuff, where adults can find tips and tools to support their family's good health and tap into a blog, the Parent Voices section, to can share experiences, opinions and advice about raising a healthy family in our busy world.
• Museums, where children's museums can go post how their museum is providing Healthy Happenings for their community and also to find ACM resources to help them create new Healthy Happenings.

Kids Dig Dirt!
Funded by Civil Society Institute, Kids Dig Dirt! is a project focused on the creation of outdoor environments where children can develop a lifelong connection to the natural world.

In 2007, ACM convened two meetings of experts who recognized the interdependence of health of planet and health of people, to find ways create outdoor environments and programs that promote children's health, conservation and sustainable development. In 2008, a "Green Paper" from these meetings will be published and presented as a tool to help children's museums and allied partners to gather resources and activate change. Additional Kids Dig Dirt activities are under development.

What future programs and resources will Good to Grow! offer?
ACM anticipates commissioning permanent and traveling exhibits on health and wellness; facilitating new children's museum programs and events related to healthy eating and active living and securing additional partnerships with national organizations that will provide with local opportunities for children's museums.

What knowledge base informs Good to Grow!?

• The Good to Grow! Advisory Board is a coalition of representatives from ACM member institutions with significant experience creating health-related exhibits and programs and experts from a broad range of organizations committed to protecting and advancing the health of children.
• We Can! (Ways to Enhance Children's Activity & Nutrition) is a national public education outreach program collaboration of four Institutes of the National Institutes of Health: the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and National Cancer Institute (NCI).
• The American Academy of Pediatrics is an organization of 60,000 primary care pediatricians, pediatric medical subspecialists and pediatric surgical specialists dedicated to the health, safety and well-being of infants, children, adolescents and young adults.

Who is funding Good to Grow!?
The initiative has received funding from three organizations and is looking to develop additional funding partnerships.

Civil Society Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think thank that serves as a catalyst for change by creating problem-solving interactions among people, and between communities, government and business that can help to improve society.

Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund is an independent public charity - was established in 1991 with the mission to further the American tradition of philanthropy by providing programs that make charitable giving simple and effective.

Institute for Museum and Library Services is an independent grant-making agency of the federal government that leads a national effort to create and sustain a "nation of learners."

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GoodtoGrow.org Resources for Members

The Good to Grow! Web site has a special Museums section. The key thing to know is that while some pages in the Museums section are visible to the public, there are important pages that are not visible to the public — these pages are for ACM Members Only.

You must sign in to access Members Only resources in the Museums section.

• Login is ChildrensMuseums and Password is Play2Learn.

Currently, there are three important resources in the Good to Grow! Museums section:

• Good to Grow! Opportunities: This is where you will find RFPs, professional development opportunities and other ways to get involved with the initiative.

• Good to Grow! Products & Resources: This is where you can download marketing tools, coloring sheets and Good to Grow! deliverables (the Green Paper is uploaded here).

• Healthy Happenings: This is the place where you can upload information to showcase your museum’s exhibits, outdoor spaces/gardens, programs, events and/or outreach efforts that exemplify the themes of Good to Grow! (eating good food; getting plenty of exercise; reducing screen time; and connecting with nature). Once uploaded, your Healthy Happenings information is visible to both ACM members and non-members. This page is one of the most visited on the site.

  If you want to contribute something to Healthy Happendings, here’s how to do it:
  1. Go www.GoodtoGrow.org/museum_member.aspx
  2. Log in as an ACM member (ACM Username: ChildrensMuseums; ACM Password: Play2Learn)
  3. Once you’re in as an ACM member, look for the “submit a project” on the next page.
  4. Sign up as a Contributor to get a unique Username and Password.
  5. After you enter in your Contributor information, the “Submit/Edit a Project” page should pop up.

  The online sharing form asks for straightforward information and also allows you to upload 1-4 digital images (150 x 150 pixels, square). If you have a basic written description of your project and the image(s) ready to go, it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to submit a “happening.”

Download a PDF with informationon about the public features of the Good to Grow! Web site
and ideas of how to promote it to your visitors and members.

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Good to Grow! Updates

Good to Grow! Updates are short electronic newsletters automatically emailed to ACM member subscribers and are achived in the Members Only section of the ACM Web site.

Get in the loop! Only those who subscribe will receive ACM's Good to Grow! Updates. E-mail Kathleen Ngo, Program Officer for Special Initiatives, to subscribe.

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