A Hub Grows in Harlem
When you get off the #3 train at 145th Street and walk down Lenox Avenue, you pass a hot wings place, two pizzerias, a soul food restaurant, a bakery, a candy store and a bar. There are three bodegas on the stretch, one with a cardboard box of bruised bananas, pale oranges and onions next to the register. That is it for fresh produce.
Residents of West Harlem experience many health challenges common to low-income neighborhoods, in addition to lack of good, affordable fruit and vegetables. The rates of obesity, diabetes, and elevated blood pressure are all disproportionately high here. About 30% of the residents in the neighborhood live below the poverty line, 13% are unemployed, and many more are underemployed. One in four households rely on food stamps and over 30% of residents live more than a 10-minute walk to the nearest grocery store.
Even as the neighborhood has changed in the past few years, and as gentrification presses in around the edges bringing in new restaurants and stores to some stretches of West Harlem, low-income residents are faced with a tricky situation. Many of the newer food options are priced out of their range, and it is easy to think of organic or healthy eating as a trend that is only relevant to the more affluent new residents. Healthy eating options for lower-income residents of West Harlem have remained bleak – until now.
The Hub
The healthy food scene brightens when you get to 141st and Lenox. There you find the brand-new West Harlem Community Healthy Food Hub. The Hub is a 400-square-foot storefront where neighborhood residents are working with West Harlem Group Assistance (WGHA)staff to bring healthy and affordable food to the neighborhood and to increase the health consciousness of residents.
A huge chalkboard, covered with colorful drawings of fruits and vegetables, covers one wall of the brightly painted room. Neighbors write on it to suggest the kind of recipes they would like to learn to cook. One table up front is for cooking demonstrations; another holds computers for staff to help with referrals to other community services. Shelves stocked with healthy groceries, and a cooler of dairy products fill the back of the store.
The Hub houses a ‘client choice’ pantry for neighborhood residents who face hunger and food insecurity in their daily lives. The food is free, and shoppers can pick up three days’ supply at a time. Staff members refer visitors to nutrition classes and assist clients in gaining access to SNAP benefits and income tax assistance.
You will likely find Jeremy Abolade at one of the tables up at the front of the Hub. Jeremy is WHGA’s AmeriCorps Healthy Food Access Outreach Coordinator. He was a nutrition major at Hunter College, and then worked as a personal chef. Jeremy reports that when working as a chef, “I met plenty of people who wanted to change their lifestyles, but didn’t know how. So I developed recipes that were familiar, easy, and tasted good. By making small changes – incorporating healthy touches into familiar recipes, with minor differences – they still appealed to the taste buds.”
While cooking for private clients, Jeremy realized he could do the same thing on a larger scale – help people make small changes that would allow them meet their health goals. When he found WHGA, he realized that he could work towards transforming a neighborhood at the same time.
Finding Healthy Food Champions
Jeremy has been leading community outreach efforts in West Harlem for the last year, getting ready for the Hub’s October 2014 opening. He has been going out to WHGA residential buildings, partner agencies, community centers and schools around the neighborhood to meet residents and let them know about ways to improve their health. He has led cooking workshops, signed people up for tours of local supermarkets to help families put together healthy meals on a budget, and helped register people for the low-cost produce-buying cooperative that WHGA offers with Corbin Hill Food Project.
At the same time, Jeremy has been identifying potential ‘Community Champions’ – residents who want to take a leadership role in their community by volunteering at the Hub and becoming local leaders using their own life experiences to help their neighbors improve their health and well-being.
Jeremy has been happily surprised by the level of interest in the Hub programs among the West Harlem neighbors he has met: “eight to 80 year-olds, they all wanted to volunteer, get involved, and talk about the needs of the community.” He met Samuel Graves last spring, when Jeremy led a cooking workshop in the kitchen of Mr. Graves’ assisted living residence.
At age 57, Mr. Graves suffers from diabetes and heart disease. Learning that he could lessen his health issues by adjusting his diet, Mr. Graves has made radical changes, including moving away from the fried foods of his southern childhood. He also traded pork sausage for chicken, and no longer eats at fast food or Chinese restaurants.
Working with Jeremy, Mr. Graves is learning to use his newly developed expertise in order to be a role model for other West Harlem residents. As a Community Champion, he is talking friends out of dinner at White Castle, advising the staff of his residence about low-sugar jelly, and discussing the relative merits of different supermarkets and farmer’s markets with visitors to the Hub. He is making the place and the work his own.
Changes: One Step at a Time
The healthy food program is an extension of the work that WHGA has been doing for more than 40 years. As the neighborhood has gentrified, they have specifically tailored services to those facing displacement. More working poor families are moving into WHGA buildings, and they find it increasingly difficult to stretch their paychecks to feed their families. Residents need food assistance more than ever in the wake of cuts to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides them with food stamps. Families that were already struggling now have even fewer resources with which to shop and cook.
Although WHGA has always had a social services department, the healthy food work is new for them. They realized they needed to bring this work out into the community, rather than expecting clients to find the healthy food programs within the warren of existing offices. The Hub fills a long-abandoned storefront convenient to public transportation and open to the neighborhood five days a week.
Jeremy and the rest of the Hub staff, along with the volunteer Community Champions, are making healthy eating accessible, attractive and relevant to the lives of low-income residents. They are making small changes, and building on successes. People who go on the grocery store tours are starting to read labels, compare prices and find whole grains on the shelves. People who take the cooking workshops are swapping for healthier ingredients and cooking techniques. Members of the Community Supported Agriculture are starting to volunteer in the Client Choice Pantry. As people make changes in their own lives, they are using the Hub to share those changes with their neighbors.
The Hub is part of LISC NYC’s Communities for Healthy Food NYC, a place-based initiative funded by the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund to address the issues of diet-related diseases, poverty, and unemployment. The initiative is at work in four neighborhoods across the city including West Harlem, Mt. Eden in the Bronx, and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Cypress Hills in Brooklyn. Jeremy is one of four LISC-funded AmeriCorps Members; each of the other Communities for Healthy Food sites has an AmeriCorps outreach coordinator playing a similar role.
Together, these neighborhood-based efforts are part of a larger movement as LISC works to integrate access to healthy and affordable food into all aspects of community development programming, and to highlight the connections between healthy eating and employment, education, and improved health outcomes.