Every year the Food Bank hosts a Partner Agency Conference, which is an opportunity for staff members at Partner Agencies to come together and collaborate in order to address the root causes of hunger. This year, nearly 300 people from more than a dozen counties came together on May 3 for the conference.
Health was a popular topic at the conference this year. A morning breakout session called “STAT! Addressing Hunger as a Means to Improve Health” was attended by staff members from more than 50 pantries. The session featured three speakers working with pantries in different ways to help improve client health: Rachel Kwan from Feeding Texas; Pam Castles, a Wesley Nurse with Methodist Healthcare Ministries, and Sari Frankel, a Health Partnership VISTA from the Central Texas Food Bank.
Attendees learned about how food insecurity contributes to poor health, which can cause anything from nutritional deficiencies to substandard academic achievement in school. A particular topic of interest was the relationship between hunger and obesity. Although it may seem like these are opposite problems, many of the risk factors for hunger and obesity are the same, such as limited access to healthy and fresh food and lower costs of energy dense food, such as fast food and convenience store food. As a result, low-income individuals are more likely to be obese and suffer from diet-related diseases like heart disease, hypertension and type II diabetes.
Although the statistics linking hunger and poor health seem bleak, there are many ways pantries and meal sites can work to improve client health—in fact, more than half of the Food Bank’s Partner Agencies are already employing at least one strategy at their pantry to provide health resources to their clients!Attendees learned about ways they can help their clients be healthier, such as making a pantry-wide nutrition policy to promote healthy food to free health screenings provided by the Wesley Nurses or other community organizations. They then broke into groups to brainstorm other ways to promote health at their pantries, and came up with creative solutions like starting a dental outreach program and changing their intake forms to ask clients to self-report chronic health conditions. Attendees were challenged to adopt at least one new strategy over the next year to improve client health.
The Food Bank staff was very excited to see all of the health initiatives our Partner Agencies are already engaging in and can’t wait to see them adopt new strategies to help clients lead healthier lives.
For the slides of the Health breakout presentation, see: http://www.centraltexasfoodbank.org/agencies/partner-agency-conference
For questions about health and nutrition, contact Angela Henry, RD, LD, at ahenry@centraltexasfoodbank.org or 512-684-2502.
