Impact Grants

The Impact Grant category enables NFL Charities to award non-profit organizations with grants aimed at making a big difference in communities nationwide.  Recently, this program has been dedicated toward supporting youth health and wellness—the focus of the NFL’s PLAY 60 campaign.  With this in mind, Impact Grants have been awarded to organizations that are leaders in the field of fighting childhood obesity, including the American Heart Association (AHA).  The NFL has worked in conjunction with AHA since 2006 to implement programs such as the “NFL PLAY 60 Challenge” into local schools and after-school facilities in order to promote physical activity and healthy environments for youth both in school and at home.

Most recently, NFL Charities awarded a three-year, $1.8 million Impact Grant to The Cooper Institute to support youth health and fitness.  This grant specifically supports The Cooper Institute’s FITNESSGRAM® program, a physical fitness assessment tool measuring student health.

The NFL PLAY 60 FITNESSGRAM is made available free of charge to more than 1,100 schools throughout each of the 32 NFL markets. Data is collected from student fitness assessments that are taken over the course of three years to build a longitudinal youth study tracking health-related fitness results and analyzing how best to intervene. The resulting data will eventually be provided to local, state, and national policy makers. 

FITNESSGRAM measures overall health through six tests looking at aerobic capacity, body composition, muscular endurance, strength and flexibility. Results, based on age and gender, are available in a report that physical education teachers can use to educate parents and students and encourage healthy behaviors. As part of the partnership between NFL Charities and The Cooper Institute, the PLAY 60 message is included in all of the FITNESSGRAM materials that are currently being used in 85,000 schools.

Results from two major 2009 studies of more than 2.4 million public school students in Texas and 1.1 million students within the New York City Department of Education show an association between higher physical fitness scores and higher academic test scores among students.

For more information, visit www.NFLPlay60Fitnessgram.com.