Gezonde Generatie

Enabling Dutch Youth to become the healthiest in the world by 2040

Project Overview

The 'Gezonde Generatie’(‘Healthy Generation’) Program is an initiative of 20 Dutch health funds that have joined forces through the Samenwerkende Gezondheidsfondsen - SGF (Association of Cooperative Health Foundations).  

The Gezonde Generatie program was proposed as a multi-year project for the health funds to collaborate on their combined mission of realizing longer healthier lives for all Dutch people – and specifically, in this case, by enabling Dutch youth to become the healthiest in the world by 2040.  

The program focuses on social and behaviour change communications that are deployed through a variety of projects - designed to either reach youth directly or work with their social circles including parents and schools.  Furthermore, as part of the program, health funds build alliances in specific health domains to influence changes in regulations to make healthy living more accessible and affordable. 

The urgency for this program is paramount given half the Dutch Population is forecast to have a chronic disease by 2040.  Furthermore, a regular four-year study of ‘Health Behaviour in School-aged Children’ across 42 countries makes it clear that  the lifestyle choices of Dutch youth related to food, exercise, alcohol, smoking, sleep and stress have a lot of room for improvement. 

Action and Impact

Towards the end of 2017, Heartbeat Ventures was asked to join a team to build an actionable plan for delivering on the vision of the Gezonde Generation Program. 

We worked with a core team at SGF to make a mobilisation plan; thoroughly sensing the current landscape of initiatives, researching health trends and ultimately, ideating, prioritizing and developing initial concepts into an executable multi-year program - including clear impact measures and a disciplined management structure to ensure efficient and effective execution.  

We helped develop and execute the overall program strategy  – including support in developing a communication strategy directly to the youth, coordinating the execution of interdependent projects across a growing number of team members, ongoing market research on trends, impact measurement – as well as facilitating the launching of alliances in the domains of ‘Food & Nutrition’ and ‘Prevention of Alcohol use’ amongst youth.  
 
At the time of writing (2021) we form a part of the extended team working to scale the impact of this program in roles including overall Strategy and Program Management, Market Research, Impact Measurement and Operational Process Management – the latter specifically for the 2k40 Media Platform (a subset of the Gezonde Generatie Program) for the youth to inspire youth to live healthier lives. 

Visit https://gezondegeneratie.nl/ to learn more about the program.

Contact person: Adnan H. Mirza