It Takes a Community!
For the last few years, the Bozeman (Montana) community has come together for the purpose of educating parents and raising community awareness about the issue
of “screen time” and our youth. We have formed a community coalition (Partners For Healthy Kids) with many partners and work together each year to organize a
very successful Screen Free Week, where children, adults and families turn off all non-school or work-related screen media for an entire week and see how life changes.
What follows is a step by step process of how to organize and implement a successful Screen Free Week in your community. We have learned a lot from our pilot project
in Bozeman and would love to share what worked and what didn’t. We encourage you to take a look at this roadmap and take what works for your community and leave the rest.
This is YOUR community initiative and it needs to fit the resources as well as the culture of your community. Good luck and have FUN doing this very rewarding and much needed work.
What follows is a step by step process of how to organize and implement a successful Screen Free Week in your community. We have learned a lot from our pilot project in Bozeman and would love to share what worked and what didn’t. We encourage you to take a look at this roadmap and take what works for your community and leave the rest. This is YOUR community initiative and it needs to fit the resources as well as the culture of your community. Good luck and have FUN doing this very rewarding and much needed work.
*The ANNALS of Political and Social Science 2008; http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/615/1/119
Steps to a Successful Screen Free Week Initiative
Step one: Build an organizing team in your community. Talk to friends, family, neighbors and colleagues about the importance of reducing screen time in children and adults and find out who is interested in working on this issue. more...
Step two: Set your game plan, contact partners and inspire them to participate. more...
Step three: Work with the Media—this is one of the most effective ways of spreading your message to a wider audience in your community. more...
Step four: Screen-Free Activities for a great Screen Free Week—here is where you get creative and involve community partners. Use the activities that you select this week to give parents ideas of what else is available in your community INCLUDING low-cost or free activities that they can do at home or outside with their kids. more...
Step five: Build in Sustainability—so that your program lives throughout the year with less intensive involvement from your organizing group. In Bozeman we like to think of Screen Free Week as the big “inoculation” and then we work to build in “booster shots” the rest of the year. more...
To view a webinar about Screen Time (with tips on how to put on a community initiative…presented by Cathy Costakis of the Montana Nutrition and Physical Activity Program) please go to the Rural Health Initiative website and download it at: http://healthinfo.montana.edu/RHI.html
This material was adapted from the Center for Screen Time Awareness “Six Easy Steps to a Great TV-Turnoff”, www.screentime.org.