Three-peat!!! Allamakee County wins Live Healthy Iowa Community Cup Challenge for third straight year

Live Healthy Iowa announced its 2014 Cup Challenge winners at a press conference held Wednesday, April 16 in the State Capitol Rotunda in Des Moines, and for the third consecutive year, Allamakee County was crowned the winner of the Community Cup Challenge and remained the only community entity to win the Cup Challenge since its inception three years ago. Dani Bucknell, co-leader of the Get Active Allamakee Wellness Coalition with Stefanie Perkins and Director of the Waukon Wellness Center, accepted the Community Cup Challenge trophy at Wednesday's presentation in Des Moines.
With 46 communities competing in the third year of the Community Cup Challenge, a point system based on participation percentage of eligible population and percentage of completion for the entire 10-Week Challenge racked up a championship total of 87 points for Allamakee County, leaving second-place Grundy County behind by nine points and pushing Allamakee County to the top of the competition for the third consecutive year.
Considering a total population of eligible participants five years of age or older, Allamakee County ranked fourth in percentage of population participating this year with 10.35% of its eligible population total of 13,384 people. But Allamakee County zoomed to a number-one ranking in percentage of participants completing the entire 10-Week Challenge, as 71.23% of this year's 1,385 participants reported activity minutes and/or weight loss results for the entire 10 weeks of the Challenge. Second-place Grundy County was the only other community close to that completion percentage, with 70.94% of its just 797 participants completing the entire 10-Week Challenge.
“I'd like to say a huge thank you to everyone in Allamakee County for their participation this year," Bucknell said. "It's pretty amazing to go to Des Moines and receive this award as a representative of our little part of Iowa. Most awards go out to bigger areas, bigger schools and bigger businesses, so to say we are an incredible group of individuals here in northeast Iowa would be an understatement! We are making great changes here in Allamakee County and I'm so proud to say I'm from here. Keep active Allamakee!”
Within the overall Allamakee County effort, there was a pair of local organizations that were also competing within Live Healthy Iowa's Corporate Cup Challenge of the 10-week competition. Within the Corporate Cup division of companies with 50-250 employees, Veterans Memorial Hospital of Waukon finished ninth out of 156 participating businesses, with the Allamakee Community School District finishing 127th in that division.
Within this year's K-12 School Cup Challenge, the Allamakee Community School District ranked 10th out of 18 participating schools. The full list of results for the 2014 Cup Challenges and more information about Live Healthy Iowa can be found at www.livehealthyiowa.org.
Live Healthy Iowa, formerly Lighten Up Iowa, was created in 2001 by the Iowa Sports Foundation as a strategic health initiative to address the state’s growing obesity problem. Now in its third year, the Challenge competitions were begun as a means to help reach Iowa Governor Terry Branstad’s goal of making Iowa the healthiest state in the nation within the first five years of the Challenge's existence.