Health and wellness fair connects employers to health resources
Organizers hope state’s employers will encourage healthy habits among employees, drive ‘significant change’ in Mississippi’s health rankings
Story by Isabelle Altman
ialtman@cdispatch.com
W
hen Christie Lawrence learned Mississippi Busi-ness Group on Health had not hosted events for employers in northern Mississippi, she want-ed to change that.The president of Starkville-
based consulting rm Surge
Advisors had worked with MS-BGH, putting on resource fairs and seminars in Jackson and on the coast to help employers implement healthy habits in the workplace and connect with businesses in the health and wellness industry. Now, she wanted to give access to those same resources to Golden Trian-gle businesses.“The whole focus of the Mississippi Business Group on Health is really just trying to rally employers to help drive change,” Lawrence said. “[...] To learn more about health and wellness, because you can do
a lot with your health benets,
the way the plan is set up, to foster and encourage more pre-vention, more focus on personal accountability.”Lawrence and representa-tives from MSBGH joined Gold-en Triangle Human Resource Association last October to
host the area’s rst Health and
Wellness Resource Fair at the Communiversity on East Mis-sissippi Community College’s campus. Lawrence said doz-ens of employers attended the event, where they sat through panel discussions and browsed more than 50 exhibits from area health care centers, gyms, yoga studios and more.“The participants upon arriv-al could visit the various tables and get information from the vendors directly,” said GTHRA President Adrienne Morris, “and be able to network, exchange
contact information, nd out
what products, what resources they had available and what they could provide for their employees.” In a state that ranks 49th in health care, Lawrence said it’s important to help business
representatives nd ways to
encourage healthy habits among employees that could prevent health problems plaguing Mis-sissippi, like obesity, diabetes and heart disease.“It’s all about, ‘how do you provide better quality but also reduce the cost?’” Lawrence said. “[...] The employers are
key, because their health benet
plan basically helps drive em-ployee behavior.”
Employers who lled out an
exit survey after the fair said they were surprised at the num-ber of health resources in the area. More than 85 percent said they would attend the fair again in 2020, while the rest said they would at least consider it.For Charles Sylvest, educa-tion pastor at Fairview Baptist Church in Columbus, the fair was a good reminder of ways to stay active at work. In particu-lar, he remembered a panel by a Mississippi State University Ph.D. student who showed them different exercises people can do at their desks.“She said, ‘Get up out of your chairs. We’re going to practice what we’ve been preaching,’” Sylvest said. “She got up and (demonstrated) different sets of stretching. […] So we physically went through some exercises that we could
use in our ofces.”
Another panel on the nega-tive health effects of sitting too much had a similar effect on Su-san Hadaway, human resources manager at West Point-based trucking company Southern Ion-ics. “Sitting disease” stuck out in
Photos courtesy Michael Stewart (EMCC)
Representatives from area businesses network at the first Golden Triangle Health and Wellness Resource Fair at the Communiversity on East Mississippi Community College’s campus last October. The fair allowed employers in Lowndes, Oktibbeha and Clay counties to get an idea of health and wellness businesses and resources in the area they could partner with to encourage healthy habits among employees. Organizers Christie Lawrence of Surge Advisors in Starkville and Adrienne Morris of the Golden Triangle Human Resource Association both said they hope to organize another such fair this year.
Below:
Airmen from the Columbus Air Force Base speak with representatives at the fair.
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• www.cdispatch.com
SUNDAY, JUNE 14, 2020HEALTH & WELLNESS
How to provide your children with healthy meals on a tight budget
Story by Yue Stella Yu
syu@cdispatch.com
O
n a Thursday morn-ing, Jane Scott picks up a package of chicken from the freezer. She places it next to a brown bag full of food and then hands it to the family waiting at the win-dow, free of charge.Scott is the president of Project Homestead in West Point — a food pantry offering food to families in need. The program mostly enrolls families eligible for the state Supplemen-tal Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP) benets and provides
each family with a month’s worth of groceries based on their family size. Many of those families have children.“We have 44 kids […] from
zero to ve years old,” she said.
“We have 188 children from six
to 18.”
Project Homestead is one of many organizations in the Golden Triangle area that help feed low-income families. The need for those feeding programs is particularly evident in Missis-sippi, where the statewide child food insecurity rate hovered at 22.9 percent — higher than most other states — in 2017, the latest when data is available, according to Feeding America, a national food bank network. The rates remained above 20 percent among all of Clay (26.6), Lowndes (23.1) and Oktibbeha (20.2) counties. As of 2017, one
in ve Mississippians was strug
-gling with hunger. One in four children was food insecure.Many children rely on their school meals under the National School Breakfast and Lunch programs administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), but when school is out, students in need often have to turn to summer meal sites to stay fed. School districts and eligible groups can apply to run those sites following USDA standards and be reimbursed by the agency. More than 850 sites in Mississippi were providing US-DA-approved feeding programs as of May 26. Only 43 sites were located in the Golden Tri-angle area and only 26 of them were still running at that time.Where summer meal sites are lacking, community initiatives, such as Project Homestead,
are stepping up to ll the void.
Other regional groups also are planning to offer free grab-and-go meals amid the pandemic.Stephanie Gibson, Christian mission director at the YMCA, said the organization partners with the Mississippi Food Network, a Jackson-based food bank that provides local food pantries with products at a low-er cost or for free. Gibson said the organization plans to offer summer meals during June and July for school-aged children,
providing each child with ve
lunch meals once a week. The site served roughly 60 kids a day and about 300 meals a week last year.Ron Thornton, CEO of the Golden Triangle Boys and Girls Club, said the organization plans to serve summer meals but has yet set a date to reopen. The Columbus location could serve roughly 300 meals each for its breakfast and lunch pro-grams. The Starkville and West Point locations would serve 100 to 200 meals for each program.
Balanced diet
A balanced meal should
include ve components —
grain, protein, dairy, fruits and vegetables — which are vital for children’s growth, said Ginny Hill, a licensed dietitian and child nutrition director at the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consol-idated School District. The district could offer about 1,700 breakfasts and 1,700 lunches a month during the summer, she said. The portion needs to be balanced, too.“We want to make sure they
have good portion control,”
she said. “If you were to think about how much meat for your student (per serving), you could think about the size of a deck of cards, that would be about a
two- to three-ounce serving.”
Gibson said the protein com-ponent, such as a chicken breast or hamburger patty, should be the main dish of a meal, and the proper size is about the palm of the children’s hands. Fruits and vegetables, she said, should be about three-fourths of the protein size.“Your grain […] could be a roll on the side or it could come as a tortilla you had your chick-
en wrapped in,” she said.
Parents should also encour-age water drinking instead of sugary drinks or carbohydrates and eating green vegetables instead of starch.“This is the most unhealthy thing that you can do for a
growing child,” she said. “It will ll them quickly. Kids love
them, but it’s not body nutrition for their brain, for their growing
organs.”
Eat healthy within a tight budget
For many cash-strapped families, however, a healthy diet can be costly. At Project Homestead, Scott said she has seen families who rely on SNAP
benets as low as $14 to $20 a
month.“Good Lord, you can’t buy
milk and bread,” she said. “I
don’t have any idea on how
they do that.”
To design a healthy diet for their kids, Hill said families with a tight budget should take ad-vantage of the feeding programs and repurpose some ingredients for later use.“Even though their child might not eat the raw carrots
right now,” Hill said, “that might
be something the parents could repurpose at dinner time. May-be steam those or put them on
the salad for everybody.”
For Gibson, parents should incorporate vital nutrition into their meals whenever they can. Canned vegetables, although not as nutritious as fresh pro-duce, can come at a lower cost.“Try at least once a day to get a palm-sized protein into
your child,” she said. “And then
try to complement it [with]
something green.”
Thornton said families can also consider growing their own food.“Now is a good time for
gardening,” he said. “(It can)
get you some fresh (products), get you out and do something
different.”
Fair
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her mind particularly because truck drivers spend so much time sitting in their vehicles.“If you’re in a sedentary position or you’re a truck driver, you’re seated at
work, let’s say eight to 10 hours a day,”
she said. “And then people go home and are seated watching TV or eating
dinner.”
Hadaway said she used some of the information and tips from the panels she viewed in her “Wellness Wednes-
day” memos she sends employees every
week. The whole fair impressed her so much she became a member of MSB-
GH to gain access to their “toolbox” of
resources.“My responsibility is to make sure that my employees have the best bene-
ts and support and resources possible to be able to excel at their jobs,” she
said. “And wellness […] allows people to excel. The healthier you are, the
further you’ll go.”
Lawrence and Morris also empha-sized networking opportunities avail-able to the fair’s attendees, suggesting businesses could partner with health care facilities or gyms to provide discounted memberships and other
“perks” for employees.
They plan on holding another such fair this fall, with a few changes. In particular, Lawrence wants to hold the panels and exhibits at different times, while Morris said she wants to begin spreading the word about the event ear-lier, so more area businesses sign up.They added the COVID-19 pandemic will affect how employers and health care professionals think about health
benets.“The next conversation will denitely
be, after COVID-19 is over with, how do you now view your health insurance programs or different wellness programs
that you offer to employees?” Morris
said. “Will you keep the same thing, or
are you going to try to change it?”
Lawrence believes Mississippi will see renewed interest in wellness and preventing health issues before they occur — but employers are absolutely critical in supporting that interest.“If the employers got together and worked collaboratively, they could
drive signicant change,” she said. “And
based on the interactions that I’ve had with health care providers, they’re will-
ing to work with them.”
Feeding programs available in the Golden Triangle area
n
USDA-approved sum-mer meal sites
Varying times and locationswww.fns.usda.gov/meal-s4kids
n
Food pantries in all Mississippi counties
myresources.mdhs.ms.gov/MRProviderServices/Index-?service=Food
n
Project Homestead, West Point
9-11 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays222 Mary Holmes Drive, West PointJane Scott, 662-418-1020
n
YMCA, Columbus
No set time or location yet602 2nd Avenue North, Columbuswww.columbus-ymca.com/
n
Golden Triangle Boys and Girls Club
No set time or location yet1815 14th Avenue North, Columbus662-244-7090911 Lynn Lane, Starkville662-615-9980634 East West Brook, West Point662-418-7285www.bgcgoldentri.org/
Photo by Yue Stella Yu/Dispatch Staff
Jane Scott, president of Project Homestead in West Point, helps volunteers at the food pantry prepare bags of groceries to the families that come looking on a Thursday morning.
Photo by Yue Stella Yu/Dispatch Staff
Jim Chandler, volunteer at Project Homestead, delivers two brown bags full of food to a family waiting outside the window.
Photo courtesy Michael Stewart (EMCC)
Representatives from area businesses network at the first Golden Triangle Health and Wellness Resource Fair at the Communiversity on East Mississippi Community College’s campus last October. Amy Billingsley speaks with a dental representative.
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SUNDAY, JUNE 14, 2020
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HEALTH & WELLNESS
Locally produced food, goods are witnessing “healthy” growth
Story by Slim Smith
ssmith@cdispatch.com
I
n 1918, America faced its greatest pandemic, the Spanish Flu outbreak, which ultimately claimed 600,000 lives in the U.S. Yet while the nation’s understanding of viruses at the time left the nation vulnerable, in one sense it was better equipped for a public health crisis than the COVID-19 virus we face today.Back then, in an era before refriger-ated trucks and interstate highways, the food supply was almost exclusively local-ly-produced. That was especially true in rural areas. People of that era knew how to grow their own food, sew their own clothes and provide for themselves other necessities not readily available in their community.One of the challenges of COVID-19 has been to the nation’s food supply, which has struggled with production and transportation to meet the demands of the public. For more than a dozen years, Alison Buehler of Starkville has been on a cru-sade to help Mississippians reclaim those lost skills, most recently as director of the Homestead Education Center, which has been providing workshops, exhibitions and seminars since 2012. For all those ef -forts, few things have spiked the interest in the self-sustaining lifestyle Buehler has preached than COVID-19.“I’ve seen more gardens here in the Starkville area this spring than I have in 20 years,” Buehler said. “With the shelter at home orders, people were home more and had more time to learn the things that we’ve been teaching for years.”Buehler’s mission is not only to help Mississippians produce more of the foods and products they consume, but develop a healthier lifestyle in the process.“I think because of the coronavirus, people are more aware of the food chain, where things are coming from. What they are discovering is the clos-er our food supply is to us, the more
simplied it is. And when you grow your
own food, you know what’s in it. I think that appeals to a lot of people. They’re becoming more aware.”For some, it goes beyond growing their own healthy food to meeting a
specic need and even turning it into a
business venture. Eliza Boyd is a great example of that.Boyd, 15, lives near Starkville at her family’s eight-acre farmstead. The family of eight grows their own fruits and veg-etables, harvests eggs from their chick-ens and has adopted a self-sustaining lifestyle. A year ago, Eliza added her own wrinkle.“I was reading about goat milk,” she said. “One of the things I read said that goat’s milk was very good in treating eczema. My little sister had eczema pretty bad. So that’s when I got the idea. My dad got me a book about goat’s milk and I did a ton of research. I decided to try it..”Boyd bought a pair of goats with her own money and began producing goat milk soap. At the time, helping her sister was the main motivation. Now, a year later, it’s progressed beyond that.“It’s a pretty complicated process and it’s not cheap to make,” she said. “In addition to lye and goats milk you have a lot of different oils that are used. Each oil has its own properties and uses. It’s a lot of chemistry and a lot of calculations just getting the formula right. Too much lye and it burns the skin. Too little and you have liquid soap. If you don’t have the right amount of an oil, you don’t get the
benet of it. It took a lot of time to get it
just right.”The actual soap-making takes about an hour, but the soap requires six to eight weeks to cure and set up enough to be cut into individual bars.She sells her soap at farmers markets in Columbus and Starkville and even though she’s learned volumes about how to run and operate a business, she still views it as more or less a hobby.“It’s a fun hobby to have,” she said. “And it’s a way to be creative.”
Photo by Slim Smith/Dispatch Staff
Eliza Boyd originally started making goat milk soap a year ago, because she had read it soothed eczema and her seven-year-old sister has eczema.
Photo by Slim Smith/Dispatch Staff
Eliza Boyd has 15 different varieties of soaps and three kinds of bath bombs, which she sells each Saturday at the Starkville Community Market.