A gathering of business, government and non-profit visionaries, the Building a Healthier Future Summit focuses on action over talk. The PHA Innovation Challenge offers a unique opportunity to realize the event’s mission of creating bold, tangible and actionable solutions using the most powerful tool available – technology. This year, Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) is working with The Feast to engage the most talented innovators and makers in technology and design to help solve the childhood obesity epidemic.

PHA is hosting a hackathon in the lead-up to the conference, when participants will prototype and build working solutions focused on the theme of Childhood Obesity. The hackathon will explore two opportunities within the challenge of Childhood Obesity:

1. To help teachers empower students to make healthy choices about the food they consume, whether at home or at school.
2. To create an information avenue that shows families the healthy food options and physical activity opportunities available locally.

PHA and The Feast are recruiting a group of the best designers, developers, stakeholders and entrepreneurs to create solutions that will help make the healthy choice the easy choice. Over two dedicated workdays the weekend prior to the Summit, participants will form teams to work on one of the two opportunities. Participants will receive support from subject matter experts and mentors in crafting their solutions while partaking in exciting activities and enjoying healthy meals. The following week, all the participating hackers will receive free admission and full access to PHA’s Building a Healthier Future Summit, with the opportunity to engage with innovators in the health sector. Two winning teams will then take the stage at Summit to present their work to an audience of 1,000 industry leaders, with one team winning an audience choice award.

PHA believes that change happens when anyone is empowered to re-imagine how something might be better and seizes the opportunity to realize that vision.