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Cultivating Community: Building paths to well-being, health, and wealth for Wisconsin

By Wello | July 26, 2024 |

The Covid-19 pandemic shed light on existing inequities that prevent all people from having the opportunity to live a healthy, well life. Food insecurity, impacting one in four Brown County, WI residents, was one inequity Wello has worked to address since our founding in 2010. By growing partnerships, we connect people who need food with the people who grow it. This helped us address immediate needs as a result of the pandemic while also reshaping the very systems and conditions that create and/or sustain barriers faced by food insecure households.

Wello’s Cultivating Community is a homegrown solution to local food insecurity. Our healthy food access initiative, started in 2020, has expanded to provide over 14,000 people in 2024 with healthy, locally grown food. Wello works with local farmers to directly purchase and distribute food to communities and people who need it. We build paths to well-being, health, and wealth for all when we prioritize local growers and distribute the food through existing trusted, dignified, and supported channels.

Why food and why now? Wello’s 2023 Community Health and Well-Being Report found: 

  • One out of every four people in Brown County don’t have enough food to eat.
  • 40% of people with annual household incomes under $50,000 reported food insecurity.
  • If your highest degree of formal education was a high school diploma, you were 2.4 times more likely to be food insecure and 3 times more likely without a high school diploma.
  • 57% of Black and African American people and 29% of Hispanic or Latino people reported not having enough money for food.

Our healthy food access initiative will begin delivering fresh food this month to existing and new partners to increase access to locally-sourced food. Through the support of a Local Food Purchase Assistance Program (WI-LFPA) Community Partners Grant from Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP), we will continue our partnership with: 

  • Casa ALBA Melanie: Hispanic Resource Center
  • We All Rise: African American Resource Center 
  • COMSA: Resource Center Serving Immigrants and Refugees 
  • Vivent Health 

These funds will also allow for the expansion to new partners to increase our reach and impact. New in 2024, we welcome:

  • Innovative Services Inc. (ISI) - Serving those with developmental disabilities
  • Oneida Nation Food Pantry
  • St. Vincent de Paul Society of Marinette
  • A group of school pantries

Also new this year is the addition of locally-sourced meat at some of the locations through a partnership with SLO Farmers Co-op and Oneida Nation. This includes ensuring all members of our diverse community have access to these local proteins in culturally specific ways. Currently, to purchase Halal meat, required in Islamic religion, you have to travel to Minneapolis or Milwaukee; a significant time and cost barrier. Wello explored options to make it available locally. Together with a local farmer, butcher, and representatives from COMSA, Halal meat will be available for COMSA clients this year with the goal of creating sustainable practices and markets for these products in years to come. 

Food can be an important entry point into well-being as it celebrates culture, brings people together, evokes memories, and of course nourishes the body. Wello’s Cultivating Community also invests in our small, local farmers. Since 2017, our work has created more than a $2 million economic impact in Northeast, Wisconsin. 

These are some of the reasons why Wello's Cultivating Community was honored with the Community Academic Partnership of the Year Award from the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee last month. We are proud to accept this award on behalf of a community full of partners willing to rethink how we address hunger in dignified ways while supporting local agriculture. 

 

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