Setting health-related policies are, perhaps, one of the first steps in creating healthy environments, influencing behavior change, and addressing health equity on a systemic level. When health-related policy is incorporated into churches, the potential to change the health of a community is impactful. And, when teens lead the policy charge, encouraging church leaders to adopt health-related policies can be simple.
That’s what teens found out throughout a three-year partnership between Wholespire and the 7th District AME Church’s Young Peoples Division (YPD). Through The HYPE Project®, youth teams were able to get more than 60 health-related policies passed at their churches. Examples of policy changes made by teens and their church leaders include:
Teens at Pine Grove AME Church in Columbia meet to plan their policy proposals.
Offering water, fruit, and vegetables when meals are served,
Including physical activity breaks during services and meetings, and
Removing saltshakers from tables in church dining halls.
Teens played many important roles in the development and passage of these health-related policies. They helped decide what policies were most appropriate for their churches, wrote the policies, and presented them to church leaders for approval.
Sometimes, policy change requires changing a policy that already exists rather than creating a new one. At Mother Emanual AME Church in Charleston, teens worked with their culinary committee to update their kitchen policy. This updated policy was changed to include healthy food choices on their menu.
The HYPE Project® teaches teens that promoting policies is key to getting everyone in on the healthy eating and active living movement. Teens developed activities to promote health-related policies like creating a walking program, producing physical activity videos, and hosting kick-off events.
At Pine Grove AME Church in Columbia, teens hosted the Reshape your Diet and Witness the Fitness community event at the Pine Grove Community Recreation Center to promote their church policies and to encourage the community to adopt a healthy lifestyle. They offered a healthy snack taste test, games, fruits of the spirit canvas painting, line dancing, healthy recipes, and door prizes.
“The youth participation at this event made me proud. Because of this event, the church is starting a community faith walk beginning the first Saturday in the month at Harbison Park,” said Miranda Blocker, YPD director at Pine Grove AME Church.
Teens led events like church walking groups to promote their policies and to encourage members to become more physically active.
At Bethany AME Church in Union, teens successfully encouraged their church leadership to create health-related policies for their kitchen. In addition to serving fruits and vegetables at church-hosted events and removing the salt shakers from tables, they decided to stop serving fried foods altogether. After promoting the policies, they’ve seen individual behavior change.
“We noticed that a lot of our church members have started to exercise more (such as joining gyms, walking) and eat healthier,” said Rena Goode. “We also noticed that our kitchen committee has increased healthy food choices for meal service.”
Through youth engagement and The HYPE Project®, the 7th District AME Church’s teens are taking on larger leadership roles and becoming community changemakers. Visit The HYPE Project® page to learn how teens can make change happen in your community.
In February 2019, the University of South Carolina Lancaster (USCL) applied for a Let’s Go! 3.0 mini-grant to increase access to its outdoor recreation amenities by adopting an open community use policy and to continue its active community environments work with Wholespire Lancaster County, formerly Eat Smart Move More Lancaster County.
The partners had completed several community health improvement projects that increased access to healthy opportunities. The mini-grant would help complete their vision while focusing on the Clinton community, a Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ) in the City of Lancaster. QOZs are characterized as economically distressed communities defined by the census tract.
Existing projects that needed to be completed were:
Improvement of the built environment in the Clinton neighborhood by extending bike lanes and crosswalks and offering a loop to the Lindsay Pettus Greenway, which improved access to the USCL campus.
USCL public health students conducted an assessment on student on-campus walking behaviors. They used the data to develop walking routes for anyone to utilize while on campus.
USCL’s recreation facilities were open to the public (including trails, walking routes, tennis courts, picnic pavilion, 5K starting point, bike lanes, and crosswalks). However, the promotion of these facilities has been limited to word-of-mouth.
The Gregory YMCA began managing the operations of the University-owned recreation facility. USCL secured funding for the YMCA to provide sliding scale financial assistance to income-eligible YMCA members on a long-term, sustained basis. Approximately 400 Lancaster residents utilize this benefit from the YMCA, many of whom live in the nearby Clinton community.
Let’s Go 3.0 mini-grant funds were used to:
Hire a professional designer to create a campus map of outdoor recreational facilities open to the public, which included the student-design walking routes.
Purchase and install way-finding signs that promote the open use amenities and walking routes.
Promote the open community use agreement policy to the community. Promotional strategies included issuing a press release to The Lancaster News, posting the press release on USCL’s website and social media, and announcing the existence and availability of these community resources at USCL’s student orientation and Clinton Elementary School’s Parent Night.
Purchase bike racks for the Lindsay Pettus Greenway trailhead in the Clinton community and the USCL campus.
Initial Challenges
For USCL, the challenge wasn’t creating new opportunities for physical activities, it was promoting the ones they already had. The USCL campus has seven buildings, a YMCA in the physical education building, tennis courts, and about a mile and a half of natural path trails.
“We’re very community-oriented, and there’s a lot of word-of-mouth advertising. This is how a lot of small towns, small communities go. We just assume that people know things, but we’re only reaching our own social circles,” explained Lauren Vincent Thomas, professor of health promotion education and behavior at USCL.
The first step was passing an open community use agreement. “When we learned about the Let’s Go 3.0 mini-grant to promote and pass an open community use agreement, I felt like we kind of already had it, we just hadn’t set it as a policy,” said Thomas. “In reality, people use the trail and the tennis court IF they know that they can, but it wasn’t widely known information.”
During the initial conversation with university leadership, they said people already knew about the trails. Convincing them that the project had value was most of the battle with the project. According to Thomas, “Wholespire had this great manual that answered all of my questions. I felt very equipped and confident when the Education Foundation asked about liability.”
A Snowball Affect
Before this project moved to the next steps, debris that was dumped in front of trails was cleared. “It just sent a message that we didn’t care about the campus,” Thomas said while explaining how things like debris deterred people from using the trails. “After that, it was just about updating some features and showing what the campus had to offer. The website was updated, billboards with maps were placed in prime positions, and trail markers and entrances were added.”
Once the project was started, more opportunities were uncovered. “We found money to put split rail fencing up to show off the trail and leveraged funding from another grant to put bike racks in, and we worked with the South Carolina Wildlife Federation to certify that we had a wildlife habitat,” said Thomas. “It reminded us of what we had and gave us the opportunity to share with other people.”
Thomas’ favorite part of the project has been connecting with people who are readily willing to offer their own gifts, talents, and resources.
“We just needed to give them the opportunity and generously thank them for what they offer. For example, we partnered with, an organization in our community that builds ADA ramps for seniors and people who have disabilities, to build a new bridge on one of the trails. They were willing to do this project for us for free as long as they got the credit. There is so much creative generosity in our community. Now, our partners feel like the trails are just as much theirs as it is USC Lancaster’s and that’s exactly what we want.”
New Conversations
The students on campus have been enjoying the positive changes the project brought. The picnic shelter has seen new light now that people know it’s there and university organizations have been enjoying the cleared trails. An outdoor club put in geocaches and monitors them to add new prizes and F3, a male CrossFit group, uses the trails for Saturday morning runs.
The project has also affected conversations about the university’s 10-year Master Plan. “This mini-grant project has primed us to have that bigger conversation about walkability in our community,” said Thomas. “There is a four-lane highway between USC Lancaster’s campus and downtown Lancaster that could benefit from a crosswalk or pedestrian bridge!”
Thomas is hoping this project is the start of making the community more bike- and pedestrian-friendly.
This last legislative session has been one for the books. From dealing with COVID-19 recovery to very polarizing social issues, the South Carolina General Assembly has been very active. Wholespire has been busy building relationships and fighting for greater access to healthy lifestyles.
For the 2021-2022 Legislative Session, we have been tracking 13 bills in the Senate and House. You can check out the legislative watch list here. Two of these bills passed full House and have moved on to Senate Education Committee.
H3319 – Under this bill, students that are eligible for free and reduced lunch must be offered the same meal as other students and these meals must be offered regardless of if the student owes money for previous meals. Districts cannot penalize students for failing to pay for school lunches and the State Department of Education will develop and provide a model policy and template for school meal debt collection to each school district.
H3006 – Under this bill, school and school districts would be unable to use debt collectors to collect outstanding debts for school lunch or breakfast accounts. It would also prevent these entities from assessing or collecting any interest, fees, or additional charges for outstanding debts.
While the legislature may be out of session until a special session, planned for September & October, Wholespire remains committed to continue the work in the “off-season.” We will continue to build relationships with elected officials and decision makers across the state, and we will be providing resources to our advocates on the ground. Additionally, the Wholespire team has developed a 3-class advocacy training series for our chapters and partners – Government 101, Advocacy 101, & Relationship Building 101.
We look forward to sharing more with you and advocating to make South Carolina a healthier state. Please contact us at info@wholespire.org if you would like to learn more about our advocacy efforts.
The USDA Food and Nutrition Service recently announced the approval of the SC Department of Social Services’ request to allow South Carolina SNAP recipients to use their Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) cards for online purchases of eligible food items. July 31, 2020, is the anticipated date for this service going live in SC and, at this time, Walmart and Amazon are the only retailers authorized by USDA to implement online food purchasing in South Carolina.
SCDSS requested approval for the use of SNAP benefits for online food purchases to support social distancing practices recommended by public health officials to mitigate risks associated with exposure to COVID-19. The Department hopes that other retailers and independent grocers within the state will be able to gain authorization from USDA to participate by the end of the summer, which will support local businesses and help boost the state’s economy.
Finding healthy food options that fall within the USDA’s healthy food guidelines can be achieved by using the Alliance for a Healthier Generation’s Amazon store The Alliance has a wide range of health foods, snacks, and beverages to choose from and they all fall within the USDA recommendations.
USDA recommends utilizing other options that retailers may already provide, such as Pay at Pick-up (also known as “Click and Collect”), where SNAP cardholders can shop online and then pay for their purchase using their EBT card at pick-up. Grocery pickup is already an option that these retailers offer beyond SNAP so they are already thinking through how they can provide a safe environment to do so with the growing concerns around social distancing.
Temporary Healthy Bucks SNAP Incentive Increase
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented many challenges for farmer’s markets, independent farmers, and some of South Carolina’s most vulnerable residents. In response to these challenges, the SCDSS has increased the maximum Healthy Bucks SNAP incentive amount to $15.00 until July 31, 2020.
The purpose of this temporary adjustment is to further combat food insecurity among SNAP recipients and to promote economic stability for Healthy Bucks vendors whose business has been adversely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
To learn more about the Healthy Bucks program and to find a Healthy Bucks vendor near you, please go to schealthybucks.com to learn more!
Eat Smart Move More SC (ESMMSC) engages community and state partners in efforts to support healthy eating and active living policies at the local, state, and federal level. In a state that suffers from one of the highest rates of obesity in the country, ESMMSC and our partners are advocating for the state and local policy changes necessary to support individuals in the adoption of lifelong healthy habits.
The new advocacy platform includes initiatives that positively effects PSE change, which ultimately help prevent and reduce the high incidence of obesity in our state. The platform addresses the following settings: Early Care, K-12 Schools, and Community. The document outlines healthy eating and active living policy initiatives from out-of-school time, FitnessGram, and accountability to healthy food sales and service, Complete Streets, and SNAP and Healthy Bucks.
Download the 2019-2020 Advocacy Platform here. If you have any question or want to get involved, contact Phil Ford at phil@eatsmartmovemoresc.org.
Close to two million
South Carolina residents and employees in three major areas of the state will
have healthier food and beverage choices when they visit vending machines and
attend meetings that offer food. To make South Carolina a healthier place to
live, Eat Smart Move More South Carolina (ESMMSC) teamed up with Voices for
Healthy Kids to help local government develop and adopt healthy vending and
food service policies. The City of Columbia adopted a joint policy and the City
of Charleston and Spartanburg County were successful in adopting a healthy
vending policy.
“To know that local
governments are taking the initiative for their employees and visitors is a
great sign for what’s to come in our efforts to increase access to healthier
options for all South Carolinians.”
“Leaders in Charleston, Columbia, and
Spartanburg County are leading by example. They spend money on nutrition
education, wellness, and other disease prevention programs, so it just makes
sense that they should support these programs by offering healthier food and
beverages in public places,” said Ford.
In 2017, Columbia City
Council voted unanimously to adopt their policy; while in 2018, Charleston’s
policy was approved by Mayor John Tecklenburg and Spartanburg County Interim
Administrator Jim Hipp approved the county policy.
ESMMSC is excited to work with leaders over the next few years to support successful implementation of these policies. If you are interested in learning more or would like to adopt a healthy vending and food service policy in your municipality or county, contact Phil Ford, ESMMSC Manager of Policy, Advocacy, and Community Support at phil@eatsmartmovemoresc.org.
The Healthy Food Choices in Public Places initiative was
supported by a grant through Voices for Healthy Kids. ESMMSC partnered with
staff from Voices for Healthy Kids, American Heart Association, South Carolina
Hospital Association’s Working Well program, South Carolina Commission for the
Blind, and local government staff to achieve this monumental success.
Eat Smart Move More South Carolina (ESMMSC) is conducting a study of our state legislators to examine their perceptions of the relative importance of different public health issues. You can play a key role in helping us by emailing your legislators today and asking them to complete our short survey. Our goal is to get 30-40 legislators to respond.
This is ESMMSC’s first call to action over the coming months. We look forward to working with you to make the healthy choice the easy choice. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact Phil Ford, Manager of Policy, Advocacy, and Community Support at phil@eatsmartmovemoresc.org.
3. Copy and paste our message into the online form:
Dear Legislator:
Please complete the public health survey that was sent to you earlier this month from Eat Smart Move More South Carolina (ESMMSC), a nonpartisan and nonprofit organization that is working across SC to make the healthy choice the easy choice.
ESMMSC and partners will be using the information to develop district-specific educational materials to aid in your decision making as it relates to your district’s public health interests.
I have included the questionnaire link below. The questionnaire takes approximately five minutes to complete. All of the information you provide will be maintained securely. If you are willing to sign the survey, it will allow for more district-specific resources to be gathered and prepared for your use.
There’s a new “micromart” canteen at the SC Court of Appeals building, and Judicial Department staff are looking for healthy options. In collaboration with the American Heart Association, Working Well, and the SC Commission for the Blind, Eat Smart Move More South Carolina (ESMMSC) hosted a healthy taste test on April 28 to help the micromart vendor determine what types of healthy options to sell.
“Here, we have a lot of health conscious people who watch what they eat and use their Fitbits to walk, so I definitely wanted to test out some healthy foods and beverages that my customers might be interested in,” said Maguya Walker, licensed vendor.
Walker is part of the SC Commission for the Blind’s Business Enterprise Program – a statewide program that helps blind and legally blind citizens become entrepreneurs in businesses such as snack bars, cafeterias, and other merchandising venues. Participants earn their business license, and are then assigned to various government locations around the state. Walker was assigned the SC Judicial Department and the SC Department of Education.
“I am doing some research now and developing my knowledge on healthy options because I want to keep my customers happy with what they want and what they’re looking for,” said Walker.
The newly opened micromart is the first canteen to be located at the SC Court of Appeals Building. Employees previously would have to venture to other buildings to find snacks and drinks.
“I’m very excited that we have something here in this building that will offer something other than salt and fat,” said Merrell Johnson, Office of Human Resources at the SC Judicial Department. “When we found out we were getting this canteen and that it was going to offer healthy options, I think everyone in our office was excited.”
Nearly 100 employees dropped into the micromart during the taste test to sample healthy options like greek yogurt, granola bars, and low-calorie beverages. Then, they rated each product they tested and provided feedback on whether or not they would buy the products. They were also given the opportunity request specific products and flavors.
ESMMSC and our partners are working with the SC Commission for the Blind and various municipalities and government agencies to ensure healthier food and beverage options are available in vending machines in government buildings, parks, recreation centers, and other public places.
“State and local governments have an important opportunity to support employees and the public in their efforts to make healthier choices,” said Hannah Walters, senior manager for policy and community initiatives at ESMMSC. “Even better, we know that stocking healthier options can be good for business and health. That’s a win-win.”
In February 2017, ESMMSC worked with the City of Columbia on becoming the first municipality in South Carolina to adopt evidence-based nutrition standards for foods and beverages purchased, sold, or served by the city, including through vending machines, meetings, and events.
“I’m very excited that we have something here in this building that will offer something other than salt and fat,” said Merrell Johnson, Office of Human Resources at the SC Judicial Department. “When we found out we were getting this canteen and that it was going to offer healthy options, I think everyone in our office was excited.”
“State and local governments have an important opportunity to support employees and the public in their efforts to make healthier choices,” said Hannah Walters, senior manager for policy and community initiatives at ESMMSC. “Even better, we know that stocking healthier options can be good for business and health. That’s a win-win.”
