Updates from the Fitness Divas: A “Glimmer of Hope” for the South Bronx

Over the last year, we’ve written about the Fitness Divas in our blog, newsletter and social media.  These amazing women – Betty Robertson, Wendy Williams, and Darlisa Evans – are an amazing group of community residents from the South Bronx who are committed to physical fitness, improving their parks, and transforming their communities to centers of health and wellness.  The Fitness Divas had an extremely productive 2012 and have plans for an even busier 2013.  Instead of Bronx Health REACH writing updates about their work, we’ve decided that you should hear it first hand from the women themselves. Below are two reflections from Betty and Wendy – what they accomplished and enjoyed in 2012 and their plans for 2013. Please make sure to check back throughout the year to learn more about their exciting work.

Betty Robertson

This is the time of year, when one thinks about where one has come from and where one is going.  Last Spring I joined a neighborhood exercise program. I didn't know what to expect, but I enjoyed getting together with other people in my neighborhood who wanted to improve their health. Our regular workouts consisted of walking to and from various local parks and aerobics classes in the gym of one of the public schools. After the program ended in July, Wendy, Darlisa, and I, the Fitness Divas, decided to continue exercising as a group on our own.  A plan was formed, space was secured, and flyers were handed out.  Yoga was added and our program increased from four to five days a week.  Participants reported weight loss, lowered blood pressure, and improvement of other medical conditions. There were many conversations about things I can and cannot speak about here, but we had fun exercising, discovering, sharing and most importantly, laughing!  Last October, the Divas joined the Jesup Avenue Recreation Center and enrolled in the NYC Department of Parks "Shape Up NYC" program.  In addition to my personal weight loss (which allows me to wear some delectable things!), I loved hearing about other improvements in the areas of blood pressure, medication intake, and overall well being.  I look forward to sharing my interest in exercise and seeing the positive results in others over the next year.

Wendy Williams

Today, I am exercising regularly approximately 5-6 times a week helping myself and others.  My blood glucose levels are stabilizing, I feel stronger and healthier and I've lost 25 pounds.  My knees feel better and better each week and I'm not afraid to take the stairs.  I am a member of the local NYC Parks Department Recreational Center and I'm studying to be a fitness instructor.  I still have some bad days, but my goal is to be the inspiration that Susan and Suneet were for me. These ladies came into the community and gave me a glimmer of hope.  They provided free exercise classes and encouraged utilization of the parks.  Today, I stand victorious, because I will continue to walk, dance, teach and inspire others to stand strong against their obstacles, eliminating barriers to fitness, health, and wellness.  Currently, as part of the Parks Department certification process, I'm teaching low impact aerobics once a week at Westchester Square Partnership.

The Food Tank: The Food Think Tank – Unlocking the Solutions to Fix the Food System

On January 10^th, 2013, food system experts Danielle Nierenberg and Ellen Gustafson launched “The Food Tank: The Food Think Tank,” a new initiative geared towards bridging conversations about hunger, obesity, agriculture and sustainability - all issues related to the food system.  Through this initiative, Danielle and Ellen hope to share stories from across the world and bring forward solutions that contribute to “healthier people, communities, and the environment.” Their idea of a better food system includes “health-based agriculture, alleviating hunger and poverty, stemming the tide of obesity, and improving nutrition and environmental sustainability.”   Their second newsletter was dedicated to the dual problems of hunger and obesity:

Worldwide, at least 1 billion people are hungry, while another 1.5 billion people are considered overweight or obese. One of Food Tank’s goals is to bridge the major disconnect between organizations that are fighting hunger and organizations that are fighting obesity. The two groups have more in common than they think and the solutions to both problems aren’t that different…. In Food Tank co-Founder Ellen Gustafson's TEDx talk, she highlights the shift in our global food system over the past 30 years toward processed foods and how this transition has perpetuated both hunger and obesity.

As their first project, Danielle and Ellen will create an online clearinghouse of the best research from across the world on food and agriculture.  This project has great potential to increase awareness of the root causes of the broken food system and solutions needed to improve it.  Per an email update from Danielle:

The solutions, both big and small, are out there—in market garden projects in rural Niger, on rooftop gardens in Vietnam, at research institutes in Taiwan, in European healthy school lunch programs, in the explosion of farmers markets across the United States, in global food retailing initiatives that prevent food waste, and in individual homes, communities, regions, and countries all over the world. The science is out there, too, yet it is not getting the funding or research support needed to develop the new metrics we need to measure a nutrition-based model of agricultural success. This needs to change.

Food Tank: The Food Think Tank will push these solutions out in front of journalists, policy-makers, and the funding and donor communities. Through our on-the ground research, we have seen the impact that sustainable and diverse farming systems can have on health and nutrition, food security, and the livelihoods of farmers and entrepreneurs.

In the South Bronx, we see the dual issues of hunger and obesity every day.  It takes more money, time, or both, for individuals in low-income neighborhoods to shop for healthy, affordable food – resources that most residents just don’t have.  We need to highlight innovative ideas and solutions in order to improve access to healthy, affordable food for all – such as at the BLK Projek’s “Not Just Talk: Food in the South Bronx” event on February 16^th.

The Food Tank: The Food Think Tank is an exciting new initiative aimed at improving access to a healthy, sustainable food system that works for everyone.  We encourage you to check out the Food Tank website at www.foodtank.org. 

End of Year Celebrations & Reflections

Before the tragic events of last week, there were several major pieces of health news. Each gave us cause for a moment of celebration and a moment of reflection.

Childhood Obesity Decreasing for the First Time in Several Cities

First, the New York Times reported last Monday that several large cities, including New York City (NYC), have seen declines in childhood obesity rates for the first time. Before this, obesity rates were going up every year. NYC first celebrated this tide change one year ago. However, the Times article was a nice reminder that we are not alone. Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and El Paso also achieved some level of success with obesity prevention programs.

This is some of the first good news in the obesity epidemic, but it but it also reminds us how much work is left to be done.  Declines were relatively small, just 3%-5%. We still have a lot of overweight and obese children who are likely to develop health problems over the course of their life.  Also, in NYC, obesity rates among white children declined much more than blacks (13% versus 2%). That means we have lots of work to do to ensure that health programs and their benefits reach ALL of our children. Luckily Philadelphia shows us that this is not an impossible dream. Even with higher rates of poverty, their obesity rates dropped the most among minority children.

New Yorkers are Living Longer

Last Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg announced that life expectancy in NYC hit a record high. Babies born in NYC in 2010 can expect to live on average two years longer than babies born in other parts of the country. The NY Post suggested that the city has become a “fountain of youth”. NYC Health Commissioner Thomas Farley credited the city’s efforts to reduce infant mortality, detect and treat HIV, and address heart disease and cancer through improved health care and anti-smoking efforts for the city’s success.

While we agree that increased rates of life expectancy are good news, a closer look at the data shows that not all New Yorkers benefited equally. While Hispanics can expect to live to be 81.9 years old, non-Hispanic Whites live 6 months less on average. Life expectancy for non-Hispanic Blacks is only 77.4, a difference of more than four years. Over ten years the gaps between groups shrunk somewhat. However, similar to our work around childhood obesity, we clearly have a lot more work to do to make health equity a reality.

Life Expectancy Improving Faster in Other Countries

Finally, last week the news media widely covered a report about life expectancy worldwide. Across the globe, many more people reach old age as compared to 20 years ago. Life expectancy is increasing, because deaths from malnutrition and infectious disease are significantly down. As a result, infant mortality has also been cut in half.

While celebrating these improvements, we noted two important facts. First, as fewer people die of hunger and infectious diseases, more people have chronic diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes. More and more, we are not alone in addressing these problems and the related health disparities. Second, life expectancy in the U.S. went up over twenty years, but not as much as in other places. Countries including Cyprus and Canada saw greater improvements than we did.  As we develop new programs, we should consider what we can learn from other countries. 

Learn More

For the most part, media coverage of these stories reported the numbers without digging very deeply into what they really mean. For more insight, we recommend a story published last summer in the Lancet, a highly respected British medical journal. The article describes disparities in life expectancy in NYC, how they stack up globally and historically, as well as what’s being done about it in the Bronx.

As always, we invite you to visit the Bronx Health REACH website to learn more about what we are doing to make health equality a reality.

Churches – still a beacon of hope as communities undergo changes both good and bad.

In an open letter from President Obama addressed to African American families in the November 2012 issue of Ebony magazine, the President begins thus, “ As a young man , I got my first start working with a group of churches on the South Side of Chicago, helping families who had no place to turn when the local steel plants shut down.  I worked with local leaders to rebuild neighborhoods, improve schools and, most of all, to broaden opportunities for people who felt like it was slipping away.”  In reading this I was reminded of the fact that time and time again it is the churches in so many hard hit communities that are the mainstay of those communities.  They stock and staff the food pantries that feed the hungry. They educate the children of the poor or at least supplement the diabolically inferior education provided by many of the local public schools (read any of Jonathan Kozol’s seminal works such as Savage Inequalities to get a first-hand description).  They rehabilitate neighborhoods that more look like the bombed out neighborhoods of Beirut than cities which are part of the greatest city in the world – New York.  It is ironic that it was the churches in New York through such efforts as the Nehemiah low cost housing program that kept many of those neighborhoods now being transformed by gentrification sufficiently intact to be now so desirable that they are the site of a feeding frenzy by vulture real estate developers. Many of these same vulture developers had bought buildings and boarded them up for decades, not caring how much it decimated the lives and real estate value of those who couldn’t flee and who clung to their American dream of home ownership. And, it was churches that operated the front lines in the battles against the scourge of crack/cocaine in those neighborhoods.

The church as an engine of change or, at least, a bulwark against the bleak social and economic forces that attempt to disembowel many of our neighborhoods is one we know well in Bronx Health REACH.  Within our community coalition we have a group of 47 churches of different denominations and sizes.  It is these churches that have been the mainstay of our efforts as we grapple with 18% of south Bronx residents diagnosed with diabetes. Many more are at risk for diabetes with the obesity prevalence rate at 31%.  Bronx Health REACH is founded on the partnerships that its parent organization, the Institute for Family Health, built with churches (as well as other community based organizations) to establish health centers in the south Bronx at a time when Medicaid Mills were the main access to health care ( I use ‘healthcare’ very, very loosely here).

Over the last decade, church leaders working with Bronx Health REACH have sought to embed health ministries in their churches.  They have either incorporated these ministries into such existing ministries as their men’s ministry, women’s ministry, youth ministry, nurses’ ministry, or have created new ministries with a singular focus on health.   A few weeks ago in San Francisco at the annual American Public Health Association (APHA) conference we presented on some of our faith based initiatives that have had demonstrable impact on some of the bleak statistics I cited earlier.

During the past year we have had visitors from the University of New Mexico, the UK and even from the Netherlands who wanted to come hear and see for themselves the work that the churches are doing in community health development.  They have explicitly remarked on the leadership role of the churches not only in the work they are doing in their respective congregations but in strongly advocating for systemic changes, most notably in ending segregated care based on health insurance status in academic medical institutions.

When the day arrives that the Bronx Health REACH slogan, “Making Health Equality a Reality’ is a fact of life it will in no small part be because of the movement that the churches in the Bronx led, and because they taught and fought to hold on to the promise of possibilities even when everything seems to point to away from that.  Their faith will have made us whole.

Charmaine Ruddock, Project Director of Bronx Health REACH

This post was previously posted on HealthCetera, the Center for Health Media & Policy at Hunter College's Blog, on November 27, 2012.