Pitt Pediatrics is excited and proud to announce that our community engagement group, CHAMP, has started this year off with a bang. Led by Sylvia Owusu-Ansah, MD, MPH, FAAP, Noel Spears, MD, MPH, and Kiki Torres, MD, MS, and deftly managed by Jess Hammill, CHAMP, in their ongoing engagement with Arsenal Middle School in Lawrenceville, has earned two prestigious awards. 
The first award comes from Pitt’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), which specializes in providing the support necessary to bridge the gap between innovative approaches to research and effective clinical and public health practice and policy. Within the CTSI is a program called the Engage Pilot Award, which seeks projects that test new ways to involve individuals in the maintenance of their own health.
The focus of the program is on individuals in the community, and emphasizes and requires a community-engaged methodology. In response to this call, the CHAMP group designed a project called YES CPR, that would engage the students at Arsenal Middle School in a youth participation pilot course, and evaluate outcomes to implement a peer led program. Beth Hoffman, PhD, MPH, in Pitt’s School of Public Health led the effort to design this program, and the work of Liz Miller, MD, PhD, FSAHM, with The Pittsburgh Study was looked at as inspiration for the program model.
This award, announced at the end of December, was preceded by national recognition with the Alliance for A Healthier Generation. This year, the national children’s organization announced the largest number of America’s Healthiest Schools in the program’s history. Of the 781 schools recognized across 36 states, Arsenal Middle School was one of 15 highlighted in the Pittsburgh region, as part of the local area’s Healthy Schools Program.
This wonderful recognition is the result of each school meeting best practices in social-emotional health and learning, physical education, and family and community engagement. Our CHAMP organization played an enormous part in Arsenal’s earning of this award, as the group and school have worked together over the last few years on those key best practices.
Arsenal staff traveled to Washington DC to attend the America’s Healthiest Schools Leaders’ Summit earlier last fall to celebrate this accomplishment.
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