Initiated in CBC Montreal Matters 2004 as a pilot project, The Weight of the World Schools Challenge was an immediate success. The project partners, the CBC, the NFB, and Montreal’s Jewish Family Services (JFS), developed a classroom activity guide to be made available at no charge to the six pilot schools in Montreal along with a loan of the film, The Weight of the World, an NFB / CBC (The Nature of Things with David Suzuki) co-production. Each school received two visits by a JFS educational facilitator, funded by the NFB, to prepare the classes to use the material. Reactions from school principals, teachers, parents and, most importantly, the children, were universally supportive. Childhood obesity, nutrition and fitness are priorities in almost all school boards and schools in Canada and they know they can depend on the CBC and NFB to deliver high quality material. This material offered schools the opportunity to develop activities in their own school on fitness, nutrition and obesity that address the situation in their specific area.

In the March of 2005, the Weight of the World (WoW) Schools Challenge project and film loan was extended to reach out more extensively in Montreal and Ottawa area schools through direct outreach work with local school boards and to the rest of the country via the website. Working with JFS and the NFB, a preparatory facilitator’s guide was prepared based on the facilitator’s experience during the pilot project. The pilot project was documented in an outreach DVD with the support of the Foundation for Greater Montreal. The supporting educational material, developed for and during the pilot project was made available on a new CBC website for the project, along with a free loan of the The Weight of the World film from the NFB. Phase Two

Project material and information were readily available on the web and there was a scarcity of educational resources in classes, so by June 2005 classes in more than 303 elementary and high schools representing over 57,000 children from all provinces and territories across Canada had registered to participate. These results were achieved with very few resources and quite limited promotion. Most schools were well beyond the initial formal target area of Montreal and Ottawa. Many requests were made for an extension of the project as time became an issue in implementing the project in the Winter / Spring 2005 term before the schools broke for the summer. The film, the website and all the supporting educational material were subtitled and translated into French. By January 2006, with no promotion whatsoever, over 100,000 young students across Canada were participating the project, merely by continuing to host the WoW website.

Given the success of the WoW project in its reasonably passive first two phases CBC and the NFB brought on two national partners for a Canada-wide extension of the project: the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada (HSFC) and the Canadian Association of Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance (CAHPERD, now PHE Canada). CBC upgraded the website (http://www.cbc.ca/weightoftheworld/) to facilitate resources, comments and classroom guides being exchanged between participating schools and the public and to make all CBC radio and television material available via the WoW Website (this archive is still available here). The NFB made 5,000 copies of the film available to give away to schools, libraries and even for home schooling use.

The main objectives of this phase were: To engage Canadian educators and families in a project dealing with a key social issue that raised the awareness of the issues of childhood obesity, fitness and nutrition and to bring the quality audio-visual material of the CBC and NFB to schools, libraries and homes; To provide a model for future educational outreach projects providing free value-added educational support materials to schools on a variety of important social issues to compliment the CBC / NFB material; and To extend the project more widely Canada by comprehensive promotion of the project & to engage a total of 250,000 students in English and French Canada.

The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation provided a grant for a full-time coordinator for this phase from March 1, 2006 to May 31, 2006. In this period over 5,000 films were shipped to the permanent collections of schools, public libraries, health clinics and youth centres across Canada. Over 800,000 young people participated in the project by viewing the film and taking on a project in their community.

In 2007, CBC decided that its direct involvement would be scaled back other partners for whom childhood obesity, nutrition and fitness were better placed to take the project into the future. CBC and the NFB offered PHE Canada the possibility of continuing to run with the project at a national level and in conjunction with other national health, nutrition, sport and fitness organisations. The transfer of project responsibility to PHE Canada is currently underway (Spring 2008) and was re-launched in Canadian schools in Autumn 2008 by PHE Canada. You can still view the archives of the project by clicking on the Archives section on the left had side of the screen. We support the efforts of PHE Canada to continue to address the important national issues of childhood obesity and nutrition.

You can access the current phase of the project with Physical and Health Education Canada by going to www.weightoftheworld.ca .

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