AMARILLO, Texas (KAMR/KCIT) — The turn of the New Year comes with individuals making New Year’s Resolutions, many of which can be centered around health and wellness. Through a partnership between two city of Amarillo departments, a new program is aimed at helping more Amarillo residents achieve that health and wellness goal within eight weeks.
The city’s Parks and Recreation Department, in partnership with the city’s Public Health department, is looking for participants in the upcoming Reset program, which is scheduled to begin Monday (Jan. 10.)
Through this free program, Amarillo residents are given the chance to have access to various programs the city offers, including fitness classes, various activities at the Warford Activity Center, along with nutritional classes and demonstrations.
Kristen Wolbach, the assistant director for the Amarillo Parks and Recreation Department, said this was a program brainstormed with the public health department in 2019. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic slowed the progress of the program, but the departments were able to host a trial session of the program in August 2021.
“The goal of the program was to incorporate not just nutrition, not just fitness, not just the mental health aspect but really, bring them all together and give people an eight-week accountability group, basically,” she said.
Even though it was intentional to start this next Reset program session at the beginning of 2022, Wolbach stressed how important it was to continue the program, especially for the Amarillo residents who live in Potter County.
“We knew with the public health assessment that anything north of I-40 when you get into Potter County, the health assessment between Potter and Randall are vastly different. That’s where public health’s niche really was, was to try to figure out how to address those discrepancies within our public health assessments,” she said. “This really came at a good time to be able to give people access to affordable health and wellness opportunities after the program. That was the main goal. We were going to give them this free opportunity to reset that lifestyle and then give them the tools to be able to benefit from it after the fact.”
It means a lot to Wolbach, as well as the Parks and Recreation department, for Public Health to be involved in this initiative, she said.
“I love the fact that public health was willing to put resources towards this programming in a time where, obviously, resources could be spent in a lot of other places,” she said. “How do we improve the health and wellness that we currently have? You know, let’s focus on what we can change. I like that public health has kind of put, you know, their grant funds where their mouth is and found ways to put staffing and implementation towards this program with us. It’s been good.”
While many of the programs existed prior to the Reset program being started, Wolbach said this program makes the programs more easily accessible for members of the community.
“There’s really no qualifier other than I’m willing to commit to eight weeks of health and wellness. I love that part of it because I think… there are too many barriers sometimes for people to want to participate. This is like ‘hey, you want to join us? Great, let’s do it,’” she said.
