POINT PLEASANT BEACH — In its very first year participating in the New Jersey Health Care Quality Institute’s (NJHCQI) Mayors Wellness Campaign, Point Pleasant Beach has earned “Healthy Town” recognition for its efforts to bring accessible wellness activities to the forefront.
According to the NJHCQI nonprofit healthcare advocacy group, this highest-level distinction is awarded to municipalities that “go above and beyond to improve health and wellness in their communities through innovative programs in areas such as exercise, healthy eating and mental health education and awareness.”
Over the course of the past year, the Point Beach Mayors Wellness Campaign has hosted more than a dozen events designed to promote wellness in all its forms, including walks with the mayor, tech tips for seniors, art events, a health fair, healthy snacks for summer campers and even a discussion of Mayor Doug Vitale’s personal health journey.
“Mayors in the past have signed on to the Mayors Wellness Campaign, but haven’t really done anything. For me, because of my own health journey, I thought incorporating health and wellness into the community was very important,” said Mayor Vitale, who was born with a congenital heart condition. The team kicked off its version of the Mayors Wellness Campaign near the beginning of Vitale’s term last year.
“At one point, we had an active senior committee and I saw that dropping off a little bit, so I wanted to supplement that with the Mayors Wellness Campaign, which would encompass not only senior activities, but all age groups and all types of wellness,” the mayor said. “When we started looking into this, we found that wellness can encompass anything from education to movement, exercise, arts, nutrition. It was a really exciting opportunity to push these types of programs out into the community.”
Vitale tapped June Cuzzo, a resident and borough volunteer, to head the Mayors Wellness Campaign in Point Pleasant Beach, citing her work ethic and tendency to take a task and “run with it” as the prime reasons.
“I was very excited that I did choose June, because she has really made this campaign successful,” he said. “I knew June; I knew her work ethic. I know that if you give her a task, she’ll run with it. You give her an event to run, she’ll run it to the best of her ability and she’ll get everybody there — she has a ton of connections to town.”
Cuzzo said that when she was given the task of running the program for the borough, she conceptualized the Mayors Wellness Campaign as a way to bring residents together.
“I saw some of the struggles the town was having over a roughly two-year period of time, and I thought that Mayors Wellness would be able to provide almost a healing for the town,” she said. “When Doug…decided that he was going to commit to the campaign, I was honored beyond belief that he would consider me to lead that initiative. We put our heads together, took decision-makers and leaders from each part of our population and put a team together that would be able to analyze what ‘wellness’ means to Point Pleasant Beach.”
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