The Healthy Living Coalition (HLC) is an alliance for action and solutions focused on improving food systems and helping close nutrition gaps that disproportionately impact underserved communities.
We are private sector and nonprofit leaders joining forces alongside experts and new voices from business, science, and local communities to tackle nutrition gaps, improve food systems, and combat food insecurity. Initiated by WW (formerly Weight Watchers) in October 2020, the Healthy Living Coalition’s leading corporate partners include Bank of America, Beyond Meat, Bright Health, Chobani, Hint Water, JPMorgan Chase, Lineage Logistics, Panera, Pret A Manger, Oak View Group (OVG), The Vitamin Shoppe and WWE and non-profit advisory partners Feeding America, New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, Wholesome Wave, American Diabetes Association and Why Hunger.
After years of improvement, the hunger crisis is now projected to get worse, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic threatening food systems and plummeting millions of people into food and nutrition insecurity. We have long believed that proper nutrition is a cornerstone for us as individuals, families and communities to thrive, and this crisis has shown us how vulnerable our world is to the threats of malnutrition.
The global pandemic has highlighted important gaps in the fight against malnutrition and food insecurity: Even though each of our companies had been supporting these issues, we had not been working cohesively to look at the food system as a whole. We realized that by coordinating our efforts, we can transform our individual action into collective impact. The first step was to convene this founding group of partners.
The goal of the Healthy Living Coalition is to unite business leadership and accelerate entrepreneurial solutions and social ventures that improve food systems and address global nutrition and food insecurity across a number of action areas:
Malnutrition comes in multiple forms that include undernutrition (wasting, stunting, underweight), vitamin or mineral deficiencies, obesity, and diet-related chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease.
Malnutrition affects all regions worldwide, and the double burden of malnutrition – the coexistence of underweight and overweight in the same person, household or community – is a big issue on our radar with global rates of hunger and obesity threatened by the impact of COVID-19.
Food and nutrition insecurity describes a household’s inability to access enough healthy food for every person to live an active life with optimal growth and development.
Last year, close to 750 million – or nearly one in ten people in the world – were exposed to severe levels of food insecurity. An estimated 2 billion people in the world did not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food.
The population facing food insecurity is expected to double as a result of the pandemic, with rates on the rise in the poorest and wealthiest countries alike.
The Healthy Living Coalition is working in alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, with a focus on SDG-2 -Zero Hunger, during the UN’s Decade of Action to 2030. We will begin immediately by evaluating partner’s impact and contributions to SDG-2 and working with our nonprofit partners to create impact-driven action plans that support the Global Goals. While each coalition member plans to maintain or increase giving to organizations who are combating food insecurity on the front lines, we also plan to invest in solutions designed to create systemic change.
The Healthy Living Coalition is committed to working with community members and nonprofit partners to create a blueprint for impact, which will be part of our first phase of work. The Healthy Living Coalition will measure our impact in the following ways:
The Healthy Living Coalition aims to activate 100 new corporate voices to commit brand and financial resources towards entrepreneurial solutions that tackle food and nutrition insecurity. In our first year, we will start our measurable impact work in the areas of consumer mobilization, improved access to good food and distribution of nutrition education. In addition, we will lay the groundwork for longer-term impact by finding and accelerating social entrepreneurs; and creating a framework for systemic change.
The Healthy Living Coalition welcomes companies and organizations from around the world to join in driving global change.
Several of our partners have a global reach, and the Healthy Living Coalition is currently assessing the regions in which our work is most needed.
Each organization is pledging action in one of these areas:
The Healthy Living Coalition will bring in third party organizations to assess and measure our impact where applicable.
To join, companies can fill out their information here: healthylivingcoalition.org/contact
Please reach out to Sona Jones, WW VP of Community and Impact at sona.jones@ww.com for more information.
