Bringing body confidence education to US schools

Thank you for your March 2020 donation to BE REAL USA via GlobalGiving. The global pandemic has shifted plans for every organization in the world over these last few months! For BE REAL, we have shifted our face-to-face teacher professional development to a virtual delivery on Zoom. This shift actually makes it easier to expand our message of body confidence for children and our reach to other states. We are in the process of contacting teacher professional development co-ordinators all over the Mid-west.

Your generous donation has enabled us to complete the following projects in the last 4 months. Thanks to you, we have been able to:

1. Complete our website at BeRealUSA.org. Please take a look! We are very proud of how it came out!
2. Revise our teacher and parent training with a fabulous graphic designer. The look and feel of our material is co-ordinated and conveys our message in style.
3. Create a training video for teachers who are not able to attend our training, but still want to teach our workshop at their school.
4. Hire 5 interns from the University of Chicago for spring and summer to help with all of our work. With the tremendous energy of these capable students, we are able to apply to foundations for grants, create toolkits for our teachers, advertise to professional development co-ordinators in 50 states, start our social media campaign, and create a college body positivity program. 

In other news, over the last few months:

• The Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health produced a report saying that BE REAL's teacher workshops are effective training for teachers. They surveyed 170 teachers who attended our training before and after our 3-hour workshop. We are very proud of the results. See report below. 
• Denise was a guest on the ED Matters podcast with Kathy Cortese discussing Body Confident Schools.
• Denise was a guest on the NEDA Networks Connections series discussing Body Positive Parenting During the Quarantine.
• Denise was featured in the NEDA Awareness Week Blog.
• BE REAL joined the National Eating Disorders Associations NEDA Network.
• BE REAL became a founding member of the National Weight and Height Discrimination Coalition. More to come here.

We are continuing to look for other partnership organizations that will help us expand our message and reach. 

Thank you for making all of this work possible. Please contact me any time with any discussion or questions: denise@berealusa.org. 

Confidently yours,

Denise Hamburger

Executive Director, Be Real USA

Links:

• Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health BE REAL WORKSHOP SURVEY
• BE REAL WEBSITE
• Denise Hamburger's NEDA AWARENESS BLOG