Culture of Health Blog

Fourteen-year-old Destiny remembers the spring day when she and a bunch of other kids planted rows of string bean seeds in the dark, loamy earth.

“There was nothing there,” she says, pointing at the dense green plants whose abundant leaves now shelter countless sweet, crunchy pods.

Today, Destiny has returned—this time with a couple dozen other children—to harvest the beans and bring them home for dinner. Later, the children will add freshly picked nectarines, cucumbers, and green peppers to their goodie bags. They’ll also take home recipes for preparing those foods.

It’s one in a series of Kids Farm Days at America’s Grow-a-Row, a nonprofit farm in Pittstown, Hunterdon County, N.J., that provides fresh produce to people in underserved communities, as well as hands-on education to kids about healthy eating.

Santa Cruz County is part of California’s central coast, a rich agricultural area where locally grown fruits and vegetables often find their way to area schools. But until recently, Del Mar Elementary School had a hard time taking advantage. Outdated equipment and lack of storage meant that produce would quickly lose its freshness and students would lose interest even faster. Three-quarters of Del Mar students qualify for free or reduced-price meals; they need fruits and vegetables the most, but the school wasn’t properly equipped to serve them.

Things finally changed about three years ago, when the school purchased a new serving line, including heated and chilled cabinets to store fresh food at proper temperatures. The fruits and vegetables not only stayed fresh longer, but Del Mar was able to serve them “buffet style,” which made it more visually appealing for kids and easier for them to choose exactly what they wanted.

In a time of tight budgets, most schools don’t exactly have extra money lying around for cafeteria kitchen equipment. So where did Del Mar get the $20,000 it needed for the new serving line? And how did their success story gain national attention?

Menu labeling in food retail establishments can help foster a Culture of Health in communities nationwide—here’s why this is great news for American consumers.

Today, First Lady Michelle Obama unveiled big news from the Food and Drug Administration: Consumers will soon begin to see an updated and increasingly useful Nutrition Facts Panel on packaged foods and beverages. This is the first comprehensive overhaul of the label since 1994.

Soon, those little black-and-white charts will inform you of the amount of added sugars in a product, and include a “daily value” to help you understand the maximum amount of added daily sugars recommended by experts. Serving sizes will also be revised to reflect the amounts of products that people typically consume in the real world. And, calorie counts will be listed in a much larger and bolder font to make them easier to spot.

Ten years ago, Los Angeles’ Boyle Hotel was more than down on its luck. The grand old Victorian dame, built in 1889 by an Austrian immigrant and his Mexican wife, was uninhabitable. Over the years neglect had turned the stunning building with intricate period details into a ramshackle apartment house with shared bathrooms and communal kitchens. The wiring was faulty and the pipes leaked. Mold bloomed up walls. Rats scurried along the hallways. Absentee landlords racked up housing code violations, ignoring the residents’ repeated requests for basic protections of their safety and health.

Most of the tenants were older, single men: many of them mariachi musicians scraping by from gig to gig. They’d spend their weekends across the street in the plaza, as generations had going back to the 1930s, exchanging news and waiting for word of a quinceñeara or wedding where they might play. The musicians were a cultural anchor for the neighborhood, so much so that the residence was nicknamed the Mariachi Hotel.

The hotel sits at the peak of a steep hill, and if you look just beyond it you can see the full glory of downtown LA glinting in the sun. Maria Cabildo, Co-Founder and President Emeritus of the East LA Community Corporation (ELACC) and current Chief of Staff to the LA County Supervisor, saw the writing on the wall: The Boyle Hotel was bound to be snapped up by developers, and replaced by luxury rooms with a view if nobody attempted to save it. With plans for the LA Metro to extend its new light rail into the heart of the plaza, she knew that new development wouldn’t be far behind. What would the influx of business mean for the residents – mariachi musicians and families alike – who’d long called the neighborhood home?

By Jasmine Hall Ratliff, MHA, program officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

In 2010 Grantmakers in Health, an affiliation of health funders across the country, launched the Terrance Keenan Leadership Institute for Emerging Leaders in Health Philanthropy (TK Institute) to commemorate the life and leadership of long-time Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) leader Terrance Keenan. The TK Institute was created to nurture the next generation of leaders, build relationships among them, and connect them with established figures in the field.

Terrance Keenan, affectionately called Terry, created and led many RWJF signature funding programs that included the Nurse Faculty Fellowships, Community Care Funding Partners Program and the Interfaith Volunteer Caregivers Program (which later became Faith in Action). (You can read more about Terry here.)

I was fortunate enough to be nominated and then selected to represent RWJF in the inaugural class of the TK Institute. Other participants came from foundations in Massachusetts, Ohio, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Washington, DC and California; they worked at community, private and family foundations with assets across all ranges. Though we represented different regions and health priorities, we had many things in common: we were under the age of 40 and had a passion for moving philanthropy forward as a field.