Owen Marsten, Intern - thefranklinpressnews@gmail.com
The new Produce Rx Program offered by MountainWise will provide free weekly boxes full of produce and meal recipes to 100 food insecure families in Macon and Swain counties. This program was previously done in 2022 and served 50 families in Swain County. Families are primarily referred by the Macon and Swain Health Departments.
The free Produce Rx Program will run for 26 weeks starting in January. Monthly events will include live cooking demonstrations, family activities, as well as giving out other resources such as cooking utensils and gas cards. Volunteers are needed to help run these monthly activities.
Nicole Hinebaugh, MountainWise Partnership for Health program director, said the program’s secondary goal is to support the local economy by buying goods from local producers. This means most of the food delivered to families will be from small and local farms. The idea is that by supporting producers, this program can work alongside them to expand the service, helping both the needy families and the small farmers.
Community and economic impact
These produce boxes are part of a region wide program. Hinebaugh said they will soon be conducting a Community and Economic Impact Assessment that will measure the economic benefits of providing healthy food to low-income families. Over the next year various WNC groups will measure how providing healthy meals impacts a family’s spending, health and education, as well as the benefits these factors provide to the local economy.
“We want to take all of this data, analyze it, and then turn it into a report on a multi-sector return on investment in these programs,” said Hinebaugh. “We’re hoping to take that quantified information, to say if you invest X in this program the return, economic and otherwise, is Y.” She said MountainWise believes this is the first study of its kind.
The majority of funding for these programs comes from grants and project partners. The hope is that this data can be used to convince private groups to invest in the program, giving them a more secure stream of funding. The initial study will take one year to gather data, once they gain enough funding.
“Think about the households themselves. As they are receiving their food boxes, these families are having their food budgets offset by hundreds of dollars a month. That is similar to having hundreds of dollars a month in pocket,” said Hinebaugh. “That is an economic boom for these families that has a ripple effect. What will they do with these extra dollars? A lot of the time they’re spending that money in the local economy.”
Hinebaugh went on to explain how a local economy is connected to healthy eating. The produce provided in these packages is sourced from local farmers. “Many of these projects are running year-round. It has the potential for year-round agricultural support,” she said.
Unhealthy food tends to be cheaper than healthy food. This means that poor families are often restricted to unhealthy meals. Providing them with nutritious meals will benefit their health, potentially reducing the amount of money spent on health care for both the individual families and government services.
Children with healthy diets have been shown to perform better in school and are more likely to seek out higher education as a result. If these children move back to the community afterwards, an educated population can also benefit the local economy.
All of these potential benefits may seem difficult to measure within just one year; however, Hinebaugh said the assessment will use previous studies to predict how the changes seen within just 12 months will create further changes years down the line.
“When you take a step back and look at all the different ways this one kind of project impacts so many aspects of the local economy, it ends up looking kind of like a silver bullet,” said Hinebaugh.
Anyone interested in donating to the Produce Rx Program or volunteering for its monthly events should contact Nicole Hinebaugh at nicoleh@mountainwise.org.