Somerdale, NJ resident Suneet Bhatt is the October winner of ideablob.com’s monthly contest for the best small business idea, as voted on by the ideablob community.

Bhatt’s initiative, Dream Village, is a series of children’s books that describe the true stories of kids who have overcome environmental, economic or social challenges. Each story aims to raise awareness about under-privileged children around the world.

“Dream Village enables child readers to experience the fulfillment that comes from making a difference,” said Bhatt. “We encourage children to make the world a better place in our story telling. For example, the first book tells how the children in a small village in Mozambique helped the village overcome its need for a dependable water source.”

The concept was created by a close-knit group of friends with a very specific skill set. Co-founders Alexander Cohen and Xavier Thomas, along with project members Hina Sheth, Pinki Shah, Soniya Sheth and Trupti Patel, each contributed to the project with their varied backgrounds.

“Our group includes a photographer, teacher, nurse and artist, and I received my MBA in social entrepreneurship,” added Bhatt. “We wanted to find a project that would allow us all to leverage our professional skills while doing something new, innovative and different.”

According to Bhatt, the $10,000 prize money will produce real products with real impact. The team will invest part of the money into funding and launching their next two books. They also plan to use some of the prize to print and sell their first 1,000 books, which Bhatt says will generate at least $5,000 in charitable donations. A portion of the prize will also go towards developing a beta version of the Dream Village website.

“Most of our ideas are under the umbrella of social entrepreneurship, and this is yet another example of the growing trend on ideablob,” said Ami Kassar, Advanta’s Chief Innovation Officer. “We like to see ideas where doing good is good business for people.”

Ideablob.com is a vital online community where tens of thousands of small business owners and entrepreneurs actively share business ideas, feedback, advice and support. In addition, experts from various industries take part in weekly ideablob discussions, offering their direct advice to site users for honing and implementing their business concepts.

Source: Advanta

Disclosure: Ideablob is a Max School Bus sponsor

Does eating right make schoolchildren perform better? A team led by Arthur Agatston, a cardiologist and creator of the popular South Beach diet, presented findings at an Obesity Society meeting over the weekend showing that improving the nutritional quality of school meals bolstered the academic performance of students over a two-year period, in addition to lowering their weight and blood pressure. The researchers saw significant increases in math scores among the 1,197 elementary students who participated in the Healthier Options for Public Schoolchildren obesity prevention program, an intervention currently used in 79 schools in seven states.

The program targets low-income students who qualify for the free or reduced-cost lunch programs run by the federal government. In addition to putting more healthful food choices in the cafeteria, it features a focus on good nutrition through school assemblies, class activities, and by having adults model good eating habits. U.S. News caught up with Agatston to learn more about the connection between nutrition and academic performance.

Were you surprised to see that academic skills improved with a better diet?
Not really. Ask any teacher about the sugar high kids have after lunch. They’re bouncing off the walls, and then they fall asleep. It makes sense that students are going to pay attention more and learn more if they’re eating well.

How exactly did you change the kids’ diets?
Many kids—while overfed—are literally malnourished. Our idea was to go into elementary schools and really change what kids ate and try to have them exercise more. This wasn’t a diet. We weren’t having them count calories or anything like that. We just offered kids wholesome food—meaning there was less saturated fat, no trans fats, and more whole grains and fruits and vegetables. We used, for example, better oils, such as olive oil.

Were the kids willing to eat the new, more healthful foods?
Absolutely. Kids will get excited about good food. We ran one assembly, in fact, that had kids standing up and cheering and giving each other high-fives for broccoli and fiber. Each month there are posters with cartoon characters about the food of the month. We had taste tests with older kids. Some of the schools even had kids help grow vegetable gardens. It’s really true: What kids grow, they’ll eat.

It wasn’t always easy. There were challenges. Some parents and people within some of the schools weren’t always interested in what we were trying to do. In the beginning, when we first substituted in all-bran cereal for Froot Loops, the kids threw it out. So we went to Raisin Bran as a compromise.

Continue reading at U.S. News and World Report

The average American child spends nearly 12,000 hours in school, from kindergarten through 12th grade. That’s a big chunk of time during which he or she can develop good (or bad) health habits.

Happily, schools today are recognizing the many benefits of a healthy head start — and Health magazine recognized the ones that are doing an A+ job. To find the health stars in America’s vast public school universe, they asked education officials in every state for their nominations; they scored those based on how they measured up to some tough criteria (see How they chose their winners), and the semifinalists were ranked by their panel of experts.

Education officials in every state were asked for school nominations based on food and nutrition, fitness and activity, health education, and healthy building materials and practices. We used rigorous criteria from the state of Wisconsin and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation’s Healthy Schools Program framework to score nominees. The top-10 schools were reviewed by our expert panel, and each panelist awarded a score to each top-10 school; these scores were added to each school’s first-round score to yield our final ranking.

Congratulations to all of the inspiring winners!

1. West Babylon Senior High

West Babylon, New York

1,510 students in grades 9 through 12

What can you say about a high school where the assistant principal strolls the cafeteria with a basket of fruit?

Top honors go to this outstanding school, which scored high across the board in every category — from nutrition to employee wellness. At West Babylon, all soda machines have been removed, so the only drinks available are water, milk, and fruit juice; the revamped cafeteria features a menu that emphasizes healthy choices, like wraps and yogurt, and has replaced fryers with state-of-the-art ovens; and participants in after-school activities are encouraged to stay on campus for healthy snacks and light meals in the cafeteria.

A districtwide commitment to fitness is paying big dividends, too: The student obesity rate dropped 2 percent in just one school year — and continues to decline. And West Babylon is particularly proud of its new physical education curriculum that focuses on overall wellness, social skills, and lifetime and adventure activities. This initiative appeals to even the least-athletic students and received praise from fitness judges Jennifer Caputo and Harley Pasternak.

“This approach shows how students of all skill and ability levels can be exposed to and benefit from being physically active,” Caputo says.

But perhaps the ultimate winning aspect of West Babylon is the commitment of its students, who drive the School Wellness Council and conduct only healthy fund-raisers. No more candy sales! Instead, kids sell baby carrots, sugar-free gelatin, raisins, and nuts.

See the rest at Health Magazine.

From the NRDC:

Schools used to be the heart of a neighborhood or community.  Children and not a few teachers could walk to class, or to the playground or ball field on the weekend.  This was relatively easy to do, because the schools were placed within, not separated from, their neighborhoods.  They were human-scaled and their architecture was not just utiliatarian, but signaled their importance in the community.  Now it has become hard to tell one from a Walmart or Target.

I was moved to find and show these photos by a couple of things:  First, when our LEED for Neighborhood Development committee met last week, we had a healthy discussion on the subject and adopted some draft revisions to make sure that our standards reward true neighborhood-scaled schools, not sprawling ones.  Second, I noticed a story in the newspaper about a school system in a fast-growing county that was looking at a two hundred and thirty acre site for a new high school.

Sound far-fetched?  A neighborhing county already has a high school on a157-acre site, below.  That, incidentally, is roughly twice the size of Disneyland in California and about half again as large as the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Florida.  Here is the school:

Note that the parking lot is larger than the school itself, and about as large as the football and soccer fields combined.

In both aerial photos above, note also the utter lack of connectivity to the surrounding area, not that there is much to connect to.  So much for being “the heart of the community” and so much for even the remote likelihood of walking.

The problem extends to elementary schools, too - the ones that should be the most closely integrated into the neighborhood.  Look below at a new suburb in Virginia (whose school is ironically named after one of the most famous rural places in American history).  The cul-de-sac layout of the subdivisions that are nearby makes walking inconvenient to start with, but to compound the matter the school is placed on an isolated tract separated from the rest of the community.

How did schools become agents of sprawl rather than antidotes to it?  In its seminal publication “Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School”, the National Trust for Historic Preservation points out that it has not been by accident.  School districts across the country have adopted nationally-recommended minimum acreage standards that not only are much larger than necessary but also force administrators to seek very large parcels that, by definition, are beyond the edge of existing communities.  And it gets worse:  published in 2000 and written by my friend Constance Beaumont and her co-author Elizabeth Pianca, “Why Johnny Can’t Walk” also highlights a concurrent set of policies that require administrators to raze or abandon existing schools if the cost of rehab reaches a certain percentage of the cost of a new one.

This is basically legally mandated disinvestment and legally mandated sprawl.

If you want to get really disturbed, you can check out an Illinois high school’s web site that unwittingly shows step-by-step how, over the decades, essentially the same school has gone from a traditional one to something that now resembles a strip mall.  Look at “the phases of JCHS.” (At least the fight song is cool.)  Sigh.

How in the world did we get from this . . .

To this?

Even worse, why have we moved away from this . . .

Just so we can build this?

by Kaid Benfield

There’s no question that the Internet is the best thing to happen to education since chalk. It is a tool, a medium, a resource, and a teacher unto itself. It helps students to better connect with and learn from the world outside. With sites like GreenMap.org, it’s a way to explore and engage with their local communities, both online and off.

The GreenMap organization, which has been in business since 1995, provides a unique set of online map-making tools that enables one to map out the local green landscape, including parks, businesses, bike lanes, landmarks, and other green-themed points of interest. The organization recently announced a socially driven counterpart to its main product with OpenGreenMap.org. The public launch date has yet to be announced. In the meantime, GreenMap has made a new set of educator tools available just in time for the new school year.

From GreenMap:

While school has been on break, we gathered up the responses from the educators and youth group leaders who tested our set of Energy and Environment Exploration Modules over the past year. We then refined and finalized these adaptable tools and the educator guide that goes with them for both in and out-of-school activities. Both New York City and Global editions are now available. We invite you to use them with middle and high school students in your community.

Thanks to our supporters who believe in the importance of mobilizing the next generation as much as we do, you can use these modules to map street trees and green space, get around car-free, find waste reduction sites and save energy at school. Download the Global version of these modules at GreenMap.org/youth. Find these and two additional modules designed specifically for charting NYC’s environment at GreenAppleMap.org/page/modules. Your teens will get a taste of Green Mapmaking and discover great ways to get involved in local greening efforts.

Educators are invited to download our new Energy & Environment Education Modules. Designed for middle and high school students, these modules include Green Mapmaking and related sustainability resources for charting energy in the school, mapping street trees and green spaces, car-free mobility and waste reduction. Download them free for the 2008-2009 school year, thanks to New York City Environmental Fund, Body Shop Foundation and Seventh Generation Foundation. Tested for a year in NYC, we hope they will give you a great introduction to our engaging approach!

Children and young adults are important participants in Green Map System, and their Green Maps are powerfully expressive documents of their explorations, discoveries and hopes for their own communities. Whether made with a class, out of school club, summer camp or on their own, youth often chart smaller areas, such as their own neighborhood, school campus or favorite park. They may make a printed, digital, poster or mural ‘theme Green Map’ that’s tied to learning objectives or a campaign regarding a critical environmental issue. Green Maps and the process of making them gives youth a better understanding of current conditions and community resources and a voice in their own future, helping them communicate with their peers, older people and decision-makers.

We’ve all heard the saying, “It’s serious as cancer.” The expression is used in many ways. It’s become cliché. But there’s a reason why clichés are formed. Like the universal feeling of being stuck between a rock and a hard place, there’s a deeper truth. In this case, it achieves cliché status because cancer presides over all things serious. It is the king and queen of seriousness. Cancer is deserving of this respect, and yet this tyranny calls for any and all action to overthrow it. To render cancer less serious and eventually not serious at all. That’s essentially what Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C) is all about.

Stand Up To Cancer is an initiative aimed at rallying the public around the goal of ending cancer’s reign as a leading cause of death. The initiative brings together an unprecedented collaboration that unites the major television networks, entertainment industry executives, celebrities and prominent leaders in cancer research and patient advocacy. ABC, CBS and NBC will donate one hour of simultaneous commercial-free primetime for a nationally televised fundraising event to air on September 5, 2008 (8 pm EDT and PDT). If you’ve not seen the PSA, it’s nothing short of inspiring:

SocialVibe is supporting SU2C in a number of ways. It’s one of the featured causes that users can choose to support by adding the brand-cause widget on their profile pages like MySpace and Facebook. These earn points for impressions which translate into cash donations. Anyone who has a profile page or blog can post the embed code, complete with a third-party sponsor like so:

Erin Brockovich fought against one company’s malfeasance in polluting the water of a local town and won. They made a movie about it, and Julia Roberts won an Oscar. This same level of travesty, however, occurs every day around America’s freeways. Unfortunately, the victims can’t file a class-action lawsuit against everyone who drives a car.

A new study finds that one in three U.S. public schools is in an “air pollution danger zone” — within about 1,300 feet from a major highway.

University of Cincinnati researchers have found that more than 30 percent of American public schools are within 400 meters, or a quarter mile, of major highways that consistently serve as main truck and traffic routes.

Research has shown that proximity to major highways—and thus environmental pollutants, such as aerosolizing diesel exhaust particles—can leave school-age children more susceptible to respiratory diseases later in life.

“This is a major public health concern that should be given serious consideration in future urban development, transportation planning and environmental policies,” says Sergey Grinshpun, PhD, principal investigator of the study and professor of environmental health at UC.

To protect the health of young children with developing lungs, he says new schools should be built further from major highways.

“Health risk can be mitigated through proper urban planning, but that doesn’t erase the immediate risk to school-age children attending schools that are too close to highways right now,” he adds. “Existing schools should be retrofitted with air filtration systems that will reduce students’ exposure to traffic pollutants.”

The UC-led team reports its findings in the September 2008 issue of the “Journal of Environmental Planning and Management”, an international scientific journal. This is believed to be the first national study of school proximity and health risks associated with major roadways.

For this study, Grinshpun’s team conducted a survey of major metropolitan areas representative of all geographical regions of the United States: Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minneapolis and San Antonio.

More than 8,800 schools representing 6 million students were included in the survey. Primary data was collected through the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

Schools within this data set were then geocoded to accurately calculate distance to the nearest interstate, U.S. highway or state highway.

Past research on highway-related air pollution exposure has focused on residences located close to major roads. Grinshpun points out, however, that school-age children spend more than 30 percent of their day on school grounds—in classrooms, after-school care or extracurricular activities.

“For many years, our focus has been on homes when it comes to air pollution. School attendance may result in a large dose of inhaled traffic pollutants that—until now—have been completely overlooked,” he adds.

These past studies suggest this proximity to highway traffic puts school-age children at an increased risk for asthma and respiratory problems later in life from air pollutants and aeroallergens.

This includes research from the UC Cincinnati Childhood Allergy and Air Pollution Study (CCAAPS) which has reported that exposure to traffic pollutants in close proximity to main roads has been associated with increased risk for asthma and other chronic respiratory problems during childhood.

Grinshpun’s team found that public school students were more likely to attend schools near major highways compared to the general population. Researchers say the rapid expansion of metropolitan areas in recent years—deemed “urban sprawl”—seems to be associated with the consistent building of schools near highways.

“Major roads play an important role in the economy, but we need to strike a balance between economic and health considerations as we break ground on new areas,” says Alexandra Appatova, the study’s first author. “Policymakers need to develop new effective strategies that would encourage urban planners to reconsider our current infrastructure, particularly when it comes to building new schools and maintaining existing ones.”

The state of California, for example, has passed a law prohibiting the building of new schools within 500 feet (168 meters) of a busy road. New Jersey is moving a bill through the legislature to require highway entrance and exit ramps to be at least 1,000 feet from schools.

Source: Daily Green

Business Week reports on action taken by Children Now to restrict junk-food advertising to kids online.

Having successfully lobbied the government to place limits on junk food ads on TV, they now target marketing to kids via the Web. “While there are some rules for TV, there are no rules when you move online,” says Patti Miller, vice-president of children’s advocacy group Children Now and a member of the Federal Communications Commission’s Task Force on Media & Childhood Obesity. “We don’t want to reduce junk food advertising to kids [on TV] and then find that it has just moved to another platform.”

The worry is that food companies are bombarding kids with ads for non-nutritious foods, fueling the obesity epidemic that, according to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, has increased the proportion of overweight kids under age 12 fivefold in the last generation and left almost 19% of kids between 6 and 11 overweight.

One of the key criticisms is that the ads are “viral”, which is to say kids distribute them in an expnential way via social networks and email (if kids even use email these days). So it’s not just the ads but also the medium. The criticism is partly that it doesn’t cost marketers as much to reach as many kids as it did through television and other traditional media. It’s like pirated CDs. It was OK to make mix tapes and essentially pirate music until file-transfer technologies made it so easy that record labels had to do something about it. And look how that’s turned out.

We can restrict access in schools and other publicly funded places. We can promote healthy eating habits in classrooms and cafeterias. We can ban cigarette advertising in television altogether because it’s bad for everybody. Tobacco companies can take their own prudent approach to avoid lawsuits and backlash, which they have. But trying to draw lines between age groups, website audiences, and what constitutes junk food or not is a fool’s errand. It also ignores who is ultimately responsible for what children eat and how they use the Internet. Unless they have jobs, who’s buying the food? Who’s paying the allowances? And who’s computer is it, anyway?

The Business Week article does a good job of presenting this opposing view:

Some consumers and marketers say families, rather than the government, should be responsible for monitoring kids’ exposure to advertising (BusinessWeek.com, 5/17/07). “Listen up, fellow parents: when we point a collective finger, three more are pointing right back at us,” wrote J. Kristin Ament, a writer for online marketing blog Unbound Edition, in a 2007 response to an earlier report by Chester and Montgomery. “When will we stop playing the victim and start taking personal responsibility for our kids’ health and eating habits.”

There are many other avenues besides laws to exert pressure on companies to tone down their messaging and targeting of children, especially young children. We grew up with the same Flintsones cereal commercials and all sorts of affable cartoon associations with less-than-healthy foods. We ate some of it, and our parents restricted access to most of it. But they also encouraged us to play outside and be active. To us, this seems like a misguided effort and more unnecessary sheltering. We have plenty of helicopter parents (we’re among them). Do we really need a helicopter government?

What do you think?

Advanta Corp. announced today that Elizabeth Dehart of West Jordan, Utah, is the July winner of Ideablob.com’s monthly contest for the best small business idea, as voted on by the ideablob community.

Dehart’s venture, Healthy Vending Solutions, seeks to offer children healthy, organic food options by making them available in school vending machines. Her initial goal is for kids to have access to healthy food alternatives in Salt Lake City area schools, and she hopes to expand the healthy vending machine concept to airports and hospitals throughout Utah and beyond.

“Have you ever been somewhere where your food choices were confined to starchy, fatty or sugary foods, when what you really want is a piece of fruit or something healthy?” asked Dehart. “That’s the problem I’m trying to solve. I would love for people – especially kids – to have healthy choices.”

Dehart, the mother of two young children, plans to use the $10,000 prize money to purchase vending machines and locate them in middle and high schools in the Salt Lake City area. She will begin by contacting several organic wholesalers.

“We’re pleased that our latest winner is someone who’s fighting a growing problem affecting so many children in the United States,” said Ami Kassar, Advanta’s Chief Innovation Officer. “The ideablob prize money will help launch her project and make a difference in her community and beyond.”

Ideablob.com is a vital online community where tens of thousands of small business owners and entrepreneurs actively share business ideas, feedback, advice and support. In addition, experts from various industries take part in weekly ideablob discussions, offering their input on ways that burgeoning entrepreneurs can hone and implement their ideas.

Advanta, one of the nation’s largest credit card issuers (through Advanta Bank Corp.) in the small business market, awards a $10,000 monthly prize to the best eligible idea, as determined by the votes of the ideablob community. In recent months, Advanta has awarded the monthly prize to software developers, non-profit leaders and several social entrepreneurs.

Childhood as we know it is over and children of future generations could enter adulthood lacking vital life and social skills because of a lack of ‘free’ play, according to a study released by Persil.

The global report, which marks the launch of Persil’s Every Child Has The Right campaign, was conducted in conjunction with leading experts in youth development and highlights the erosion of childhood. The report found 85% of UK mums are concerned that children are growing up too quickly and 64% believe children are being deprived of childhood through the lack of free play.

In response to this study, Persil as part of the Every Child Has The Right campaign is launching its Free Play Initiative 2008, a nationwide scheme aimed at helping parents find inspirational ways for their children to express themselves through imaginative, unstructured play. This culminates in the support of Playday, the national annual celebration of children’s right to play, on 6 August 2008.

Did you know?

Free play helps the following areas of children’s development:

• Boosts their imagination and creativity
• Improves language and expression
• Helps them stay active and prevents obesity
• Reduces stress
• Helps raise self-confidence
• Increases emotional development and social skills for later on in life

As a guideline it’s recommended that parents should try to make one hour a day of active, ideally outdoor play for all children. They need little structure or encouragement because children are naturally active. They just need the time, permission and the right space.

To help your kids get the most out of their play time, the Free Play Initiative focuses on five areas within play that can help a child’s development - Play, Explore, Create, Imagine and Experiment.

To find out more about the Persil Free Play initiative 2008, Playday 2008 on 6th August, build a scrapbook to document your summer holiday of free play.