September 17, 2016. The Daily Reflector.
Dr. Kathy Kolasa featured Schweitzer Fellows Megan Hnilica and Sarah Brown in her column in the Daily Reflector.
Kathy Kolasa: COA community garden does more than educate
Dear readers: For the last three years, I have had the privilege of serving as a consultant or mentor to ECU medical students participating in the Food is Medicine (FIM) organization. They have provided nutrition education and cooking demonstrations at the senior center in Greenville.
This year, two best friends, second-year Brody School of Medicine students Megan Hnilica and Sarah Brown, were awarded NC Albert Schweitzer Fellowships to expand the work of the FIM, a student-led program dedicated to improving health through evidence-based nutrition education and community partnership. They worked alongside the Pitt County Council on Aging (COA) with a goal to move beyond the lecture series provided in the past two years and help create lasting opportunities for healthy living. I am pleased to share with you the work they did creating a community garden that complemented the lectures. Here is what they want you to know.
When most people picture a community garden, they imagine rows of vegetables, freshly watered plants and the satisfaction of harvesting food. They may not picture the conversations that happen between the rows, the friendships that develop over shared work or the confidence that grows when someone harvests something they planted themselves. Yet those moments made our Food is Medicine initiative so meaningful.
The inspiration for our initiative, Growing Together, came from a simple question: What if nutrition education didn’t end when class was over?
Supported by the NC Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, we developed a community garden in the courtyard of the Pitt County COA that complements our nutrition classes and provides participants with opportunities to engage in healthy behaviors long after the final lesson concludes. As future physicians, we are interested in lifestyle medicine or the use of therapeutic lifestyle changes to prevent, treat and often reverse chronic conditions. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine recognizes six pillars that help prevent, treat and even reverse many chronic diseases. Our garden naturally brings four of these pillars to life by encouraging whole-food, plant-forward nutrition; increasing physical activity; reducing stress through time spent outdoors; and strengthening social connection.
What has surprised us most, however, is that the garden has become much more than an educational tool. It has become a community. Participants who first arrived as strangers now volunteer to water the garden together, stay after class to exchange recipes and gardening tips, and share updates on the vegetables they are growing at home. The excitement has been contagious. Together, we have celebrated multiple harvests of cucumber, bean, radish and okra plants and expanded our four raised beds and three container gardens with four additional raised beds for our fall crops.
The garden’s purpose also serves as the foundation for an ambitious long-term mission to engage the members of the community who may not have been reached through our Food is Medicine classes offered at the center. This series has become a fan favorite in the community thanks in large part to the generous donations from the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina. These donations allowed us to cook a healthy recipe for participants to taste in class and send them home with the ingredients needed to recreate the meal. This approach has been powerful because demonstrating that healthy eating can be both delicious and budget-friendly is often the encouragement participants tell us they need to make meaningful changes.
However, we realized that our culinary series was not reaching some of the local seniors who no longer cook for themselves. To better reach these seniors, we wanted to create an initiative that could address fruit and vegetable intake, social connection, nutrition literacy and overall well-being in a new way. That’s how the community garden was born.
About 16 seniors have fully participated in the garden between June and July. Each week, seniors signed up for a watering slot where they checked on the plant health, watered and pruned, harvested and distributed extra produce to others at the COA. In class, we discussed nutrition or sharing ways that our produce could be incorporated into simple, cost-friendly and healthy meals. Then we went into the garden to work together.
Looking ahead, our long-term vision for our organization is to grow enough fresh produce to supplement the COA’s Meals on Wheels program. In doing so, we will expand our impact beyond our own garden and class participants. We hope for a future in which excess produce grown by local farmers can be reinvested into the community through programs like ours and Meals on Wheels. Although tiny, we believe that this garden initiative has the potential to lay the foundation for a multi-pronged effort where the community can truly “grow together.”
n addition to showing our gratitude to the Pitt County COA, Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, and the NC Schweitzer Fellowship, we extend our thanks to Kathy Kolasa, PhD, RDN; Brittany Smith, RDN, MS; Kori Brewer, PhD; David Michael, MD; and Dell Hagwood, RN, Master Gardener at the NC Agricultural Extension, for their steadfast mentorship and support. Their expertise has helped us provide education that is both evidence-based and responsive to the needs of our community. We are deeply grateful to learn from those who have dedicated their careers to serving others and to carrying that knowledge forward through this work.
We found this project was a great opportunity to connect with new people and share our mission and have made many new friends.
Professor emeritus Kathy Kolasa, a registered dietitian nutritionist and Ph.D., is an affiliate professor in the Brody School of Medicine at ECU. Contact her at kolasaka@ecu.edu.