Discover SparkAmerica

As you know, our society has many health challenges: obesity, prediabetes, diabetes, inactive or sedentary lifestyles, childhood obesity and other childhood health issues that might be dooming millions of kids to lifelong problems, just to name a few.

We strongly believe that all of these issues are not only a health challenge, but also a leadership challenge.

Today I want to introduce you to a global movement we are building and discuss how you can play a part in this campaign!

A National Campaign to "Spark" America's Fitness and Health, Leadership and Community Support

"We are bold enough to believe we can change America and the world, but humble enough to know we need help—continued help from our many millions of visitors and help from visionary leaders and organizations all over the world." Chris "SparkGuy" Downie, SparkPeople Founder and CEO

Imagine a world where millions of people use leadership to take control of their health, their life and their destiny. You have already started learning many of these leadership skills in this SparkCoach program and this campaign is one way to activate those skills. Results from SparkAmerica will include:

• Parents will have the skills and energy to do a better job for their children
• Children will have a better chance at a happy and healthy life
• Companies will be more productive and happier places to work
• We’ll all be healthier, happier and more energetic, thereby making our communities—and the world—a better place!

I’m writing as a resident of the U.S.A. and recognize that most readers initially will be in the U.S., as well, but with strong global ambitions to help people with this campaign, SparkAmerica will eventually be tailored to many other countries—SparkCanada, SparkUK, SparkAustralia and many others, for example. In fact, the more that people from other countries spread the campaign's message around and join our national leaderboards, the more likely we’ll choose that country for expansion. This entire project is called SparkEarth:

This is all truly doable and, as Fit & Healthy Leaders, we can come together to play a leading role in this vision.

Campaign Overview

SparkAmerica is led by SparkPeople, our 50+ million annual visitors and leading partners across America. Partners include major media outlets, household-name nonprofits, large brands, experts, influencers and many other leaders with more joining each week.

Our aspirational mission is to build the greatest-ever campaign in the areas of fitness and health, leadership development and community support.

The campaign partners are working together in ways that leads to mutually beneficial business and organizational relationships while also working together toward a greater social impact on some of the most pressing issues our country faces.

The campaign is built on a technology platform and program that builds Fit & Healthy Leaders and conducts many types of challenges, including challenges that rank cities, companies and more based on the activity of their participants. This type of friendly competition—with many types of challenges happening simultaneously—has never been done.

Activating Fit & Healthy Leaders

You have learned how to be an energetic Fit & Health Leader in this 28-day program; now visualize millions of people completing this same program. Next, visualize these Fit & Healthy leaders using some of their extra energy to be a positive force supporting their friends, family, co-workers and community in reaching goals. This is leading to a major impact all over America and beyond!

Local/National/Global

In addition to the SparkPeople members mentioned above, SparkAmerica is a local, national and global campaign that integrates:

• A "bottom-up" strategy with alliance partners in cities all over America and, eventually, the world.
• A "top-down" strategy with national and international partners that have a large reach to millions of people. These types of partners will bring benefits such as additional articles and videos for the SparkPeople platform intended to help members reach goals, spreading the spark to new audiences and more.

Many partners joining together increases the odds of success!

Partners in Action

Examples of SparkPeople partners include the NFL’s Denver Broncos and Buffalo Bills, superstar fitness and health expert Jillian Michaels and American hero and bestselling author Homer Hickam, whose life story was made into the inspirational film "October Sky."  

An example of an integrated city campaign is SparkPittsburgh, where we built a local challenge platform that does corporate challenges and more. SparkPittsburgh partners so far include:

• WTAE, ABC-Pittsburgh, the area's largest media outlet
• Babb, Inc., a leading insurance broker
• Innovative Wellness Solutions, a top corporate wellness company
• The United Way, YMCA and the American Heart Association
• Live Well Allegheny, improving the health and wellness of Allegheny County residents
• 150 companies and organizations, all competing in company challenges

The SparkPittsburgh campaign was featured by media partner ABC-Pittsburgh. This 45-second video from the Western Pennsylvania United Way showcases the winning kids in a test with them that ranked locations by steps taken in their "Healthy Out-of-School Time" program, which has 7,000 kids and includes other partners like the YMCA and Children’s Hospital.

We are out pitching SparkAmerica to many leading "big name" partners around the country and in some other countries who are excited about being part of this campaign, along with other behind-the-scenes developments that we will share as they happen. This has us more energized than ever about seeing this vision become real at an accelerating pace.

I'm sharing these examples so you can visualize us replicating this in cities all over the world!

Ready to participate in SparkAmerica or SparkEarth? Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Select your favorite affinities on SparkPeople: This will make all of the fitness minutes, steps and SparkPoints you earn using the SparkPeople website and app count toward your individual totals, but also to be added to each one of the affinities you select. This lets us rank all of the affinities in different categories, effectively serving as a motivator to help your country, state, city, employer, favorite sports team, favorite nonprofit and more rank high on the leaderboards.
• If your company or other favorite affinity is not on the list, you'll see a link to add this to the appropriate category. With little promotion, members have already added 400 affinities. One of our goals is to make this a form of a free corporate wellness program.
• Leaderboards are meant to be a great form of friendly competition, but they also strongly signify the chance for tens of thousands of organizations and millions of people to come together to make a positive impact with this campaign.
• Spread the spark by sharing SparkPeople with your family, friends, co-workers and community. You really can make a difference in this campaign!