Michelle's Health Grows with Access to Nutritious Foods

Dated 12.1.2018

Building a healthy community requires the right mix of ingredients. 

Your support has been a key ingredient for building community health!

With your help, this year we expanded our Health & Wellness work to make the largest impact inside and outside our buildings.

By combining staff knowledge and advocacy, our community gardens, local corner stores, and resident expertise, many Tenderloin residents have been able to transform their health.

A resident of the Tenderloin, Michelle* has experienced this transformation firsthand. Michelle’s health once prevented her from walking long distances and finding grocery stores with healthy food.

Because of your support, her local corner store, a member of our Tenderloin Healthy Corner Store Coalition, now has healthy options.

“Having healthy food choices close by and healthy corner stores helped me improve my own health and then little by little I was able to get better and eventually I was able to walk more,” Michelle explained. “It’s such an important thing. It’s a life-changing thing, and I appreciate it very much.”

Now she uses her improved health to give back and learn from the community.

She recently participated in a cooking demonstration at our Tenderloin People’s Garden, where Tenderloin residents and staff made tacos and salad with nopales, a cactus native to Mexico.

Food and Nutrition Supervisor, Rebbeca Barajas, chose nopales in honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month and for the cactus’ health benefits, such as lowering blood sugar, affordable price, availability in the Tenderloin, and of course, its delicious taste.

Michelle found the recipes valuable and relevant because the Tenderloin has a higher rate of diabetes than other neighborhoods in San Francisco.

Thank you for planting the seeds for a healthier Tenderloin. We are excited to continue expanding our Health & Wellness work in 2019!

*Name has been changed to honor the resident’s anonymity.