ND health program tackles childhood obesity

Childhood obesity is a growing health risk many children face in this country, and a new mentoring program at Companions for Children aims to tackle that issue by giving kids the information they need to get healthy and have a good time doing it.

Billy Seright, executive director of Companions for Children in Minot, said the new Wellness Companion Mentoring Program targets two needs in the community.

"One, it could allow us to match more of the kids that want mentors, albeit it for a shorter time period and in a limited scope. It would still allow us to expose these kids to some form of mentoring, where at this point they're not," Seright said. "We've got 40 kids that want mentors that don't have them, and so this would allow us to at least expose them to some form of mentoring, a limited form. So more kids could be served, basically.

"The second one was again to address the problem of childhood obesity. Yes we're focusing on a certain population because that's the population we serve, but possibly other groups could replicate the service that we do for other groups of children and even work with us to provide this sort of service to other groups of kids outside of single-parent homes."

With a master's degree in health education, physical education and recreation from the University of South Dakota, Seright is the ideal person to spearhead the new program. He said the idea for wellness mentoring came forth while they were trying to think of ways to meet the needs of the children they serve, many of whom are still waiting to be matched with a mentor.

After some investigation, Seright found there are several types of wellness programs for children and the federal government even gives out awards for participating in some of them for a period of time.

"We're not linked to that, but the fact is that some things in this arena or like this were going on out there," Seright said. "Whenever you see that, that lets you know that there is some common practice going on and this isn't just some wild hair that is not backed up by any evidence."

The wellness mentoring program not only gives children a second way to get a mentor, it offers adults a second way to be a mentor. If a potential adult companion isn't sure about committing to a full year in the traditional mentoring program, they can try the shorter 8-week wellness mentoring program. While the wellness program is different in scope and length, it still has some similarities to the traditional program.

"You still go through screening and then the match is focused on helping the child who you're matched with to become more physically active and to increase their knowledge of proper nutrition and to use that knowledge of proper nutrition in their daily lives," Seright said. "So that's the main goal. You're trying to get them to be more active and to eat better."