Big Picture

Can your WIC workplace become a center of wellness?
This year, California WIC is introducing WIC Worksite Wellness, a program designed to make every California WIC site a wellness center for both staff and participants. This new initiative has been in the making for almost a year. Led by a State WIC and Local Agency Advisory Committee, CWA and its 82 member agencies have created a multi-layered workplace wellness program to help all staff members achieve wellness goals. When wellness is the office culture, the benefits are lifelong.

WIC Worksite Wellness is based on responses from over 1,500 of you to a statewide survey about wellness concerns, awareness, and workplace involvement. We actively sought your ideas, advice, and recommendations to guide us, and then designed a program geared to fulfill the program’s vision“to create and sustain a healthy and thriving WIC community.”

Workplace Wellness is not new. How will WIC’s be different?
Each WIC site will identify the specific needs and wellness interests of its particular staff members and ask them to help determine the make-up of their WIC Worksite Wellness program. While there will be similarities from site to site, not every program will be exactly the same.

Using the Ten Steps to a Well WIC Worksite as a guide, each agency will add its own policies and mechanisms to make wellness an integral part of its worksite culture. This may mean time for lunchtime talks, meditation, walks, rewards for healthy recipes, whatever staff members deem important, and each staff can set individual wellness goals as well. Then, later in the year, WIC will provide a sponsorship toolkit to help agencies solicit local support from participating business that will help fund incentive awards and build community partnerships. Another toolkit in development focuses on media tools and tips designed to help the agencies publicize success and sustain the program over the long term.

Once your agency has achieved your goals, the agency will be visited by a Wellness Team, and certified as a Well WIC Worksite. This official designation will come with statewide recognition and official signage, so that your staff will be encouraged and reminded that they are part of a statewide movement. CWA will assist you in sustaining your Well WIC Worksite program by seeking corporate and organizational sponsorships to support ongoing site and individual incentive items and staff engagement activities.

Vision
To create and sustain a healthy and thriving WIC community that focuses on a culture of mutual support and physical, mental, and emotional well-being.

Mission
To ensure that staff wellness is at the forefront of prevention efforts by the WIC Program. To encourage employees’ personal and professional productivity, and physical, mental and emotional well-being, WIC Worksite Wellness will adopt a holistic approach that actively supports employees
to make healthy lifestyle choices.

Goals

1. Adapt organizational policies around wellness: Harness WIC’s success as a critical player in the state’s efforts in health promotion and obesity prevention.
2. Build capacity for community collaboration so wellness goals may be achieved through cooperation and integration between partners.
3. Develop a strong strategic plan to guide efforts and activities to succeed, and link the wellness program to overall Agency strategic objectives.
4. Develop and build sustainability into the wellness program to keep employees engaged and challenged.
5. Prepare WIC staff to understand and promote the new WIC foods, so they can be effective educators by modeling healthy eating and physical activity behaviors.
6. Contain health care costs, reduce absenteeism and employee turnover, and improve morale and productivity.
7. Collect data to drive wellness efforts and shape policy.
8. Develop an evaluation strategy to measure progress