University-Anchored Partnerships
AUNI is housed at the University of Pennsylvania's Netter Center for Community Partnerships.  Like its parent organization, AUNI is based on the premise that universities are uniquely positioned to solve complex and interconnected problems of the American city.  AUNI links teaching, research and service, particularly academically based community service courses, from across the University to problem solving partnerships with the public schools.  This collaborative work typically involves many stakeholders, including Penn students and faculty and public school partners in efforts to address community problems and to bring about concrete and systemic change.  Penn is a leader of local, national and international networks of institutions of higher education committed to engagement with their local communities.  This linkage to the curriculum helps students K-16+ simultaneously to improve nutrition and academics. It is also our strategy to sustain AUNI by integrating the work into courses at the university level as well as into the public school curriculum.

University-Assisted Community Schools
Since 1985, collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania, led by the Netter Center for Community Partnerships, and West Philadelphia school and community partners, has helped to transform existing public schools into university-assisted community schools throughout the local neighborhoods. This approach focuses on the public school as the core institution, the hub, for community engagement and democratic development. AUNI supports university-assisted community school programs, including evening, weekend, extended day and summer activities, which are anchored in a close partnership with the school day curriculum.  Extended day and school day programs emphasize the integration of problem solving learning with academics and job-readiness and involve parents and families.

Real World Problem Solving
AUNI transcends traditional models of nutrition education by engaging learners in hands-on efforts to solve the systemic problems that manifest nutrition-related disease.  Students internalize healthy eating habits as they work to share these messages with the broader community. Students also work to improve their local food system and environment.  Furthermore, AUNI is based on the idea that program participants must be active participants in designing, operating and evaluating interventions if they are to be long-lasting and successful.   This approach also helps improve academic learning and engagement, K-16+.

Specific Geographic Areas
AUNI is increasingly focused on integrating and aggregating a critical mass of activities in a network of public schools that serve particular neighborhoods. This approach combines longitudinal involvement for children and families and neighborhood environmental change.

1.  School Day Nutrition Education
Through Eat Right Now, the School District of Philadelphia's Comprehensive Nutrition Education Program, AUNI conducts nutrition education programs in 20 Philadelphia public schools.  The primary focus of Eat Right Now is on increasing the nutrition knowledge of K-12 students.  AUNI incorporates as many hands-on components (such as monthly healthy food tastings) into this program as possible. 

2.  Increasing Access to Healthy Foods
AUNI engages young people in organizing better choices for their communities through school and community based efforts.  Through AUNI, public school students work to improve lunchroom choices and operate after-school fruit stands.  AUNI also works with public school students to help neighborhood food stores create convenient healthy food stations and to operate community farmers' markets.

3.  Increasing Opportunities for Participation in Regular Physical Activity
Through school day, after-school, evening and summer programs, AUNI improves opportunities for youth and families to exercise regularly. AUNI works with PE teachers and school coordinators to improve exercise opportunities during PE class and recess time and, through the Netter Center for Community Partnerships' community schools program, AUNI offers family-oriented exercise classes during evening programs.

4.  School Gardens
AUNI builds and maintains school gardens to increase familiarity with healthy foods and as a food systems link to the science curriculum.  Several of the gardens also help increase access to healthy foods through connections with local farmers markets.  With the recent expansion of AUNI school day programs, many schools have yet to start a gardening project.  In these cases AUNI supports field trips and partnerships with existing community gardens.

5.  Youth-Led organizing, Peer Education and Internships
Increasingly, people recognize the important role that youth can play as organizers of solutions to societal problems on a variety of levels; as the deliverers of social and educational services, as the developers of model programs, and as key informants to policy makers. In addition to school day peer education, AUNI coordinates job-training and youth leadership programs for high school students. The AUNI internship program engages teens in organizing better food choices in their communities by working after school and during the summer.  AUNI interns combine direct service approaches, which include teaching healthy cooking classes to all ages and growing healthy foods in school gardens for sale at farmers' markets, with advocating for broader systems change. In spring 2008, AUNI high school interns are organizing the Youth Action Council for the Philadelphia Urban Food and Fitness Alliance (PUFFA).  They have also been highly involved in youth organizing on a regional and national level.