The Healthy Living Program consists of a guided physical education program, a hot meal, and visits from a food truck that distributes fresh, affordable, and local produce.
The Healthy Living Program is one of our most popular and consistently attended programs. Our clients have a myriad of mental and physical health challenges such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety. Research also indicates that refugee populations living in the United States have higher rates of chronic illness compared to non-refugee immigrant or native born populations, including diabetes and hypertension. Nutrition and diet are significant factors in disease development.
Our long-range goal is to invest in the health of our very vulnerable refugee community through health education and wellness programming. By providing exercise and nutrition classes, as well as interpreters to facilitate understanding, we seek to help our refugees improve their own health. We hope this will aso build in sustainability as the participants learn to modify cooking and shopping at home, which will impact their families in turn, as well as the larger community.
Students participating in Cooking Matters, a six-week program in nutrition and food preparation run in cooperation with Foodlink.