Military Community & Family Policy Strategic Innovation Office -Healthy Base Initiative

Scope: Strategic Analysis, Pilot Testing, Policy Advisory

Services: Food & Beverage, Health & Wellness

Issue: The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has significant challenges related to the effects of obesity and tobacco use, including service member health, healthcare, force readiness, and the costs associated with these issues. The Healthy Base Initiative (HBI) was a short-term demonstration project designed to inform DoD’s long-term strategy — called Operation Live Well (OLW) — to make healthy living the easy choice and the norm for service members, retirees, DoD civilians, and their families.

Process/Outcome: To assist with addressing these issues the Office of the Secretary of Defense retained CHMGS professionals to:

Assemble a multidisciplinary team to devise and test evidenced-based initiatives to address obesity, tobacco cessation, and increase active living, among other goals, at fourteen US DoD pilot installations;
Assess the current health and wellness state of the military community and military environments;
Implement, measure and report on the effectiveness of the initiatives;
Develop lessons learned, challenges, and policy recommendations for Operation Live Well and the DoD

The HBI team then worked with DoD, the individual Services, other federal agencies, non-profit organizations, and academic institutions to identify evidence-based initiatives that addressed the strategic objectives and could be implemented within the one-year timeframe of the demonstration project.

Lessons, Challenges, and Policy were broadly grouped into six categories: