Together for Health:
Empowering Youth, Enriching Communities

We are dedicated to creating healthier environments for children and adolescents living in disadvantaged socioeconomic settings. Our project focuses on co-developing community-based interventions that promote better diets and physical activity, aiming to reduce health inequalities and fostering sustained behavioural change. By engaging communities in every step, from design to implementation, we strive to break cycles of health disparities, ensuring that no one is left behind. Our research draws on extensive population-based evidence from ongoing cohort studies, investigating how early-life determinants influence diet and physical activity behaviours over time.

By examining the impact of different socioeconomic circumstances on these behaviours and their associated health outcomes, we aim to clarify how the environment shapes health trajectories. This knowledge will inform the design and assessment of our interventions, ensuring they are grounded in real data and capable of making a meaningful impact. Central to our approach is the co-creation of interventions. We involve children, adolescents, and their families, alongside key stakeholders such as parents’ associations, teachers, academic researchers, urban planners, and social services, in developing and implementing solutions tailored to their needs. By empowering communities to actively participate, we aim to co-create interventions that are not only effective but also inclusive, sustainable, and culturally sensitive. Building on the success of previous community interventions, we will test and refine our approach in six diverse urban environments across Europe.

This will allow us to explore how our co-creation model can be adapted to different cultural, social, and political contexts, ensuring that our solutions are applicable and impactful on a broader scale. To evaluate the success of our interventions, we will employ innovative assessment methods that go beyond traditional health indicators, focusing on aspects such as robustness, translatability, and public health impact, especially in populations living in vulnerable conditions. Our ultimate goal is to develop policy tools and implementation guidelines that will help governments and stakeholders understand the potential of our co-creation approach, guiding future efforts toward greater health equity.