Let's Move! provides the ideal opportunity to attract grandparents and grandchildren into your health or wellness center or program by providing participants with shared experiences and multidimensional health benefits, depending on the programs offered. To embrace this opportunity, you may want to incorporate the intergenerational activities below into your programming, or use them as a springboard for other ideas.

1. Walking the World

Start this walking program by describing the reasons why walking is good for health and how to make walking workouts enjoyable. Create an adventure for grandparents and grandchildren by making the goal to circle the globe. Ask participants to count their steps with pedometers and to write down their results. Pin a map on the wall to track progress, and count each step towards mileage. Recognize efforts by enrolling grandparents and grandchildren in the President's Challenge.

2. Family Album

Invite grandparents to bring photographs from the family album. Encourage them to use these images to talk about the past, allowing grandchildren to ask questions and discover more about their grandparents. Introduce an extra level to this program by suggesting that grandparents help grandchildren begin a photo album of their own.

3. Scavenger Hunt

Create a list of small things for grandparents and grandchildren to search for on a walk. Include items appropriate to your environment, e.g. a paper clip, a leaf, a white stone. Count the number of scavenged items each pair has at the end of the walk. Let the pair with the most things choose the next adventure.

4. Book-lovers Club

Ask grandparents and grandchildren to read books together, with the goal of discussing them at monthly Book Lovers meetings. Encourage participants to discuss the books they've read with other members of the club. Prepare for an enthusiastic exchange between book lovers, young and old.

5. Group Exercise

Make group exercise opportunities for the whole family. Offer classes in tai chi, swimming, yoga or group fitness, for example. Give dance classes for families. Come up with dances and name them after families participating in the program. Consider having family nights a few times a week.

6. Life Stage

Start a theater group to offer creative fun for grandparents and grandchildren. Ask the participants to write, produce and direct a year-end play for the theater group to perform. Urge them to come up with an active, fun play. Invite family members to the performance.

7. Tennis for Two

Offer tennis classes for grandparents and grandchildren at a special intergenerational rate. At the season's end, organize a tennis tournament in which participants play other intergenerational pairs. Suggest that grandparents and grandchildren invite other family members to watch or join in the fun. Provide fun awards to program participants, and be creative when coming up with award categories. When the tournament ends, throw a party to recruit other family members for the upcoming season.

8. PC Pals

Provide intergenerational computer classes, which allow grandchildren to help grandparents learn basic computer knowledge. Encourage family groups to use the computer to communicate.

9. Family Play

Devise activities that provide all family members with opportunities to work out together, e.g. outdoor hikes, biking or walking trips, or sports days. Host a family Olympics, with fun events and categories for all family members. Ensure that activities are accessible for all participants.

10. The Learning Files

Help grandparents share their skills and talents with younger family members by giving them opportunities to teach grandchildren - even if they are learning a topic themselves. Make lesson plans fun and easy. Give tomorrow's plan to grandparents, so they can prepare to teach grandchildren about subjects such as meal planning, reading food labels, or choosing the right footwear for an activity.

Relationships with grandchildren bring love, energy, play and purpose into the lives of older adults. In return, children benefit from the attention, maturity, knowledge and love of their grandparents, many of whom are caring and thoughtful role models. By creating programs that bring together these family members, you can provide individuals with healthier futures and valued life experiences, while improving your bottom line.

The 2nd anniversary of the Let's Move! campaign provides a moment to raise awareness of the obesity epidemic and reflect on two years of real progress.

Thanks, in large part, to Let's Move!, concern over obesity now extends beyond public health circles and may be found in local schools, faith-based organizations, and town meetings. And, perhaps most importantly, the Let's Move! campaign seems to have ignited a golden age of innovation for anti-obesity programs designed to create sustainable healthy habits.

But what fascinates me most about Let's Move! is the role of its champion, First Lady Michelle Obama. Of course, her standing as First Lady provides her with a podium and an audience, but it has been the combination of her passion and energy that has fueled the development of countless initiatives around the nation. Quite simply, she has accomplished what very few studies or policy statements can ever hope to do - she has inspired people to take action.

She is widely viewed as a talented, charismatic communicator, but her skill set is by no means unique in America. American communities are full of passionate and energetic folks who can rally others to their causes. Community leaders are part of our national heritage.

One of this year's major goals for the International Health, Racquet, and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA) will be to encourage and support the efforts of IHRSA health clubs - i.e. passionate fitness advocates - to transform their facilities to vital community hubs for healthy living and disease prevention. We believe, wholeheartedly, that the success of the Let's Move! team may be replicated on a local scale by fitness centers. In fact, it's already happening.

IHRSA's commitment to health promotion will be on full display this month at IHRSA's 31st Annual Convention & Trade Show in Los Angeles, CA.

The convention schedule includes sessions such as, "Leveraging Healthcare & Wellness Programming to Better Serve the Community," "If Exercise is Medicine, How do Health Clubs Cure Illness?" and "Lessons from Corporate Wellness to Get People Active."

The capstone session, however, will be a keynote presentation and panel with members of the President's Council on Fitness, Sports & Nutrition ("the Council") to discuss the IHRSA Joining Forces Network and other opportunities for health clubs to impact the wellness of their communities. IHRSA's Get Active America program, for example, will empower clubs to become champions for the Council's PALA+ program, which encourages folks to be active and improve their diet 5 days/week for at least 6 out of 8 weeks. Another offering, IHRSA's I Lost it at the Club, provides clubs with an 8-week turnkey program for responsible weight loss.

For more information on IHRSA's effort to support the operation of health clubs as vital community resources, please check out our Vision for a Healthier, More Prosperous America, and let us know what you think.

What are other organizations doing to create community champions?

Like a lively puppy that is thriving, joyously active and everywhere at once, Let's Move! has energized America with no sign of slowing down. In just a year, First Lady Michelle Obama's initiative has prompted families, individuals and organizations to take health into their own hands. Collectively, we're eating better and finding ways to be more physically active. It adds up to healthier lifestyles for a whole spectrum of people and reflects encouraging momentum in the fight against childhood obesity.

As more and more of us connect the dots - through Let's Move!, the National Physical Activity Plan, Exercise is Medicine (EIM) and countless other initiatives - we're helping the movement mature. Recounting success stories and lessons learned lets us share best practices. EIM on Campus connects colleges and universities with one another, but also with their local communities. Groups like the National Society of Physical Activity Practitioners in Public Health allow professionals to learn from one another and share resources.

We're learning not only from one another, but from new research about exercise, nutrition, physiology and motivation. This is essential to make sure our programs and policies will be effective. From molecular-level, basic science to studies of group interaction and epidemiology, new knowledge is providing a solid base of evidence to underpin our efforts.

Similarly, approaches to healthier lifestyles range from the granular to the global. We know that every bite we consume, every calorie expended, brings with it a health impact. Individual actions become habits, with immense effects on individuals over time. Family members influence one another, and whole communties can gain a collective consciousness or identity around healthy lifestyles (think Portland, Oregon, where bicycling is a shared passion).

A spectrum of solutions

Some of us emphasize physical activity and exercise, but we know that's just one factor in the health equation. Nutrition plays a huge role, as do tobacco and alcohol use, air quality and more. We've learned that all these elements must work together, and that healthy behaviors must become part of our everyday lives to be effective. And their adoption requires the kind of one-on-one modeling that happens in families, classrooms and circles of friends - but also the collective action that is reflected in organizational and community policies.

The vision reflects the range of benefits, from individual health and quality of life to societal gains in worker productivity and reduced health care costs. We're getting there, thanks to a growing foundation of research, immeasurable individual effort, and the unstoppable enthusiasm of initiatives like Let's Move.

How do your efforts complement the work of Let's Move!, the National Physical Activity Plan and other initiatives?

How can we activate more people to "think globally; act locally" to foster healthier lifestyles?