What if every child in the United States had access to nourishing food, joyful movement, and a thriving natural environment? That’s the vision driving the Life Time Foundation — Life Time’s nonprofit arm — and, in 2025, that vision came to life in cafeterias, classrooms, and communities across the country.
The foundation focuses its work on three pillars: youth nutrition, youth movement, and a healthy planet. And with Life Time as its parent company, the organization is uniquely positioned to make an impact across each pillar, according to Sarah Emola, executive director of the Life Time Foundation and the company’s Environmental, Social, and Governance programs.
“The Life Time Foundation’s mission speaks directly to the heart of our employees and the work that they’re all passionate about: helping people live healthier, happier lives,” Emola says. “At the foundation, we make it a priority to connect with our network of 45,000 employees, so they can act not only as a voice in their communities, but also as boots on the ground — volunteering, leading initiatives, and advocating for change where it matters most.”
The foundation advances its mission through targeted, measurable grants to organizations that are already making strong, meaningful progress in their unique communities. By the end of 2025, it will have invested $1.75 million across its three pillars to help kids and communities live healthier, happier, more resilient lives.
Often, those partnerships grow beyond the dollar value, with their impact rippling for years and even generations. “We try to focus on partners who are really trying to make systematic changes: not just a change for today, but also a change for tomorrow,” says Emola.
An Example of an Enduring Partnership
In 2020, the Life Time Foundation partnered with Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) — a district serving approximately 35,000 students from preschool through 12th grade — to support its vision to improve school meals with clean-label ingredients and increased scratch-cooking practices. At the time, CPS had a clear goal but needed the boost of a partner; that’s where the foundation came in with a grant exceeding $425,000 to help upgrade kitchen equipment across the district’s 66 schools.
With properly updated kitchen equipment, CPS school-food professionals were, quite literally, better equipped to help meet the district’s goals: increasing scratch and speed-scratch cooking; offering clean, whole, and simply prepared foods; and minimizing the use of ultraprocessed ingredients. Since the partnership launched six years ago, the district has attained a 19.4 percent reduction in its carbon footprint, in part supported by the changes it made to school menus and food preparation practices.
“They truly listened to and invested in our city’s children by helping us get the equipment we needed to propel our mission,” says Jessica Shelly, director of student dining services at CPS.
Today, the Life Time Foundation and CPS remain committed partners in advancing school-food reform, both within the district and at the national level through their involvement in two key collectives.
The first one is the Ingredient Guide for Better School Food Purchasing, a free resource that defines ingredients that school nutrition professionals and manufacturers aim to eliminate to improve the overall quality, nutritional value, and safety of school meals (like additives and other ultraprocessed ingredients). CPS actively applies this guide in its procurement decisions and also benefits from the Life Time Foundation’s free online tool, Green Onion, which helps school nutrition teams identify ingredients of concern and transition toward healthier alternatives.
The second collective, ScratchWorks, is a national coalition of school-food professionals and nonprofit organizations working to expand scratch cooking in schools. Both CPS and the foundation are active participants; the Life Time Foundation also serves as a donor and strategic partner for ScratchWorks to support district-led efforts to bring freshly prepared and minimally processed meals to students nationwide.
“The Ingredient Guide helped us define our objectives for school nutrition, while ScratchWorks helped connect us to other school districts to gain new insights and support while sharing our successes and learnings,” says Shelly.
She adds: “We gravitated to the Life Time Foundation because their vison for youth nutrition so closely aligned with CPS’s when it came to what we’re feeding our kids.
What was important to us wasn’t the dollar value from the Life Time Foundation; it was the recognition and support. They believed in us enough to create a true partnership. It wasn’t just a drop of money and run; the foundation has truly stood with us step by step.”
The Life Time Foundation’s 2025 Impact
Fueling Kids With Nutritious, Delicious School Food
In 2025, the Life Time Foundation will have invested nearly $330,000 in its youth nutrition pillar to advance clean-label efforts through Green Onion, support scratch-cooking practices in schools nationwide through ScratchWorks, and fund initiatives focused on nutrition education and providing healthier snacks to young children.
A notable portion of the funding supported Miami-Dade County Public Schools — the third-largest school district in the United States — through a $75,000 grant to expand its Food Forests for Schools initiative to a total of 30 food forests. A school-based food forest is the planting of diverse edible plants designed to mimic the ecosystems and patterns found in nature. These spaces serve as a vibrant outdoor classroom for students to engage in nutrition, agriculture, and sustainability education.
In Miami-Dade County, the food forests serve more than 27,000 students — a testament to the Life Time Foundation’s belief that a child’s access to nutritional food and environmental education can go hand in hand.
The foundation also continues to invest in its Green Onion software, empowering school nutrition professionals to make cleaner, healthier choices at scale.
“The impact of a single product change — especially for staple items like tortillas or bread — can be exponential,” says Valeria La Rosa, the foundation’s program director. “A cleaner ingredient in a frequently served item can translate to hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of meals with improved nutrition density each year. Green Onion helps make these changes possible, scalable, and sustainable.”
Keeping Kids Moving for Life
By the end of 2025, the Life Time Foundation will have committed nearly $400,000 to its youth movement pillar, supporting initiatives that help children build lifelong habits of physical activity.
A major investment went to All Kids Bike, a national organization that teaches children how to bike in their kindergarten physical education classes. This involved a grant of $99,000 that helped fund 11 Title I schools (public schools that receive federal funding to support students from low-income families) with full a Learn-to-Ride program, which included a fleet of bikes, helmets, and teacher training to build lifelong movement skills for 1,000 children. This number will also grow exponentially because a single bike has a lifespan of one decade — meaning 10,000 children will be positively impacted by this grant over a 10-year period.
Havel Elementary in Sterling Heights, Mich., was among the schools that received funding support. Team members from Life Time Shelby Township joined in to assemble the bikes, ensuring students were ready to ride.
“Bikes are one of the first key movement opportunities for kids,” says Emola. “The act of removing training wheels is so pivotal — it teaches them independence, while biking can also instill a love of the outdoors. The increasing statistic of kids who don’t know how to ride a bike is a large reason why the foundation is leaning into these Learn-to-Ride programs.”
Additionally, the Life Time Foundation awarded more than $270,000 in grants to other organizations committed to getting kids to move more often. These initiatives included after-school running programs; bike camps; track-and-field programming; and Kids Run Miami, a program that gives elementary and middle-school students in Miami-Dade County the opportunity to eventually run their first marathon. By encouraging goal setting and consistent movement, these programs help children build confidence, develop healthy habits, and experience the joy of physical activity.
Protecting and Preserving the Planet
In support of its healthy-planet pillar, the Life Time Foundation distributed more than $980,000 in funds to 12 organizations focused on environmental restoration and education. These grants supported community clean-ups, tree plantings, reforestation efforts, and strengthening tree canopies in urban areas — all helping to create healthier, more resilient ecosystems for future generations.
In honor of Earth Month in April 2025, the foundation awarded a $300,000 grant to American Forests, the oldest national nonprofit conservation organization in the United States dedicated to conserving and restoring healthy ecosystems. The funding supported the planting of more than 100,000 climate-resilient trees within the Rim Fire scar in California’s Sierra Nevada, an area deeply impacted by wildfire and in need of ecological restoration. (Learn more: “Planting 100,000-Plus Trees Together.”)
“We’re passionate about this work because planting trees is akin to planting hope,” says La Rosa. “Trees clean our air, cool our cities, and bring life back to places that need healing. But more than that, they are a gift we are leaving for the next generation. We might not be around to sit in their shade, but our kids and grandkids will be.” (Learn more: “Why Trees Matter So Much — for the Health of People and the Planet.”)
Looking Forward to 2026
Heading into 2026, many nonprofit organizations and systems are striving to adapt to federal policy changes that impact how they operate. The Life Time Foundation plans to remain a steadfast partner throughout these shifts.
“With federal budget cuts in various areas that we support, we understand that the Life Time Foundation has an obligation to continue to support the work that directly connects to our shared missions,” says Emola.
In the coming year, the foundation will scale its impact across all its three pillars: expanding the work to eliminate ingredients of concern and increase scratch cooking in school meals, deepening biking and running programs for youth, and investing more than $1 million in reforestation and urban greening projects.
The foundation also plans to continue investing in its Green Onion software, expanding its reach beyond its current footprint of 14 states.
How You Can Get Involved
If you’re inspired by the Life Time Foundation’s mission to take action, the best way to contribute is through donation.
A few dollars can go a long way when donated to the Life Time Foundation. For instance:
- $4 is the average price of a nutritious meal for a kid.
- $9 helps a child discover the joy of biking.
- $25 plants a small grove of trees.
Life Time members can add a monthly donation to the Life Time Foundation through their membership dues. Life Time team members can also contribute directly from their paychecks. Anyone is able to make a one-time or monthly donation here.
Life Time covers all the foundation’s operational costs, so every cent donated goes directly to programs and grantmaking, supporting school-food professionals, educators, and community leaders working to create healthier futures for kids. All donations are tax-deductible.
“At Life Time Foundation, we’re not measuring our impact by the amount of dollars given in grants, but instead the number of people we help,” says Emola. “We’re going to continue to foster deeper relationships and strategies with organizations that align closely to our mission of helping kids and communities live happier, healthier lives.”
