THE FIT KIDS FOUNDATION INC

Our mission is to promote a healthy, active lifestyle among children in underserved communities in the Bay Area by providing various opportunities to be involved in organized sports and fitness classes. We hope to inspire an early love of sports and physical activity that will serve as the foundation for a healthy lifestyle while simultaneously helping to build positive relationships, self-confidence, independence and the ability to deal with adversity.

The kids we work with through Fit Kids do not have access to after school sports programs for various reasons including cost constraints and a lack of availability in their communities. In addition many of these kids have very limited or no PE at school so Fit Kids is providing the only guided physical activity that many of these children receive. Beyond providing fitness for these children, we are also keeping kids engaged in positive activities in the after school hours, providing positive role models through our coaches and addressing the low participation rates in fitness activities among the low income population and the discrepancy in participation rates in fitness activities between boys and girls. Finally we are addressing the obesity epidemic with Fit Kids. While we are not trying to be a weight loss program, weight loss is a natural consequence of physical activity. Whether or not a child loses weight, we really want to help children fall in love with being fit and active which will not only serve them for a lifetime but will certainly help combat the obesity epidemic plaguing our country today. By making fitness fun, we want to make a significant impact on the children we work with and instill a life long love of physical activity that will translate into healthy choices as children grow. Whether that be making better food choices, participating in sports when the opportunities present themselves or simply staying more active at recess and after school, we want to impress upon these children not only the importance of staying fit and healthy but also that fitness can be fun!

A few statistics that demonstrate the problems that we are trying to address:

• According to one study, about 75% of children from white middle-class backgrounds participated in organized sports activities, while only 40-60% of low-income children of color did so.
• Boys have more opportunities to participate in organized sports than girls, and girls’ opportunities to participate diminish more rapidly as they advance from elementary to high school.
• Today’s children are likely to be the first generation to live shorter, less healthy lives than their parents due to obesity and other related diseases.
• One-third of American children and youth are either obese or at risk of becoming obese. 5 In California, 17.6% of children over the age of 5 are overweight.

The Fit Kids program is unique because it does not focus on a specific sport, rather encompasses various aspects of a variety of sports to expose children to many different activities. In addition our program is unique because it encourages the development of a child’s entire body vs. participating in a specific sport, which will develop certain parts of the body and skills specific to that sport. By developing a child’s entire body we are hoping to prepare children for any sport that they may choose in the future and at the very least children who go through Fit Kids get a total body workout that will help in their healthy development. Our fitness curriculum brings a wide variety of physical, social, and emotional benefits and we believe better prepares children to participate in sports because they have had the chance to develop their whole body. Through a combination of stretching, fitness games, relay races and obstacle courses, each Fit Kids class takes children through a series of fitness activities that are incredibly fun for them. Children spend the entire hour at Fit Kids completely engaged because the benefits of the class are disguised in the games and fitness activities.