Partners create a healthier Tillamook County

Michelle Jenck:
We attracted not only our healthcare partners who were already obviously part of doing that kind of work in the community, but we brought in other community partners that were in the food systems or in providing community programming around health and wellness, like the YMCA and OSU Extension. We also attracted private business and other organizations and sectors like the schools. Everybody wanted to be part of it and they all stepped up in some way, shape or form to participate at some level.

The decision to focus on prediabetes was largely centered around the fact that the same community health indicators, the same health behaviors, the same health equity concerns and the same social determinants of health influence a lot of chronic diseases, whether they be diabetes, cancer, heart disease, stroke. We’ve long understood what we need to be doing differently to be healthier and for a variety of reasons, it’s been really hard to actually achieve those goals. So, the effort that we identified as a priority in our community was really intended to address the fact that there is this huge disconnect between what we know we should be doing and what we are doing, and how could we as a community step up and fill that gap?

Lauren Sorg:
Our community members are facing so many barriers on top of barriers, on top of barriers that access to food gets lowered down on the priority list for parents that are trying to keep their lights on or that have other bills to pay.

We provide these spaces for consumers to come in and access the food. So, like our farm table store front, we have a farm share program so that is a weekly subscription box that anyone could sign up for. We’ve got three local farms that deliver the products to our storefront and then the community member signs up their family and themselves and they come on a once a week basis and pick up their food. We’ve expanded that program to meet the needs of low-income community members by providing a hundred dollars off for SNAP families to be able to have a farm share box.

Curt Shelley:
So, in Tillamook the school is the focal point of the larger community. And when I say that, what I mean is that there are so many things that go on here and it’s a great opportunity for us to promote wellness, to promote health, to promote emotional and physical wellness. And it’s really nice, the support and the collaboration that we get from other organizations around community.

Health means something different to all people. And for some people it’s weight loss or some people it’s healthy cooking, for some people it’s socialization, and so it’s different for all people. And so we’ve put as many things together that we could put together to allow people to become involved and participate.

Michelle Jenck:
Behavior change is heavily influenced organically. What people see and observe around them is what they tend to do. It’s just how we’re wired. And so creating the conditions in the community that influence behavior in that organic way is really what we strive to do.

Curt Shelley:
So we’ve noticed that when you’re well you want to come to work and we’ve also noticed that we have less absences on Wednesdays, and we would like to think that that might be because of some of the Wellness Wednesday things that we have going on and motivational things through wellness.

Michelle Jenck:
Encouraging people to understand how changing their relationship with food, changing their relationship with being active, changing their relationship with how they interact with each other in their family unit, at work, in the community can be done in a way that’s health promoting. And an extension of that is that they are likely to lose some weight and they are likely to experience some potentially significant improvements in their health indicators as a result of that.

Lauren Sorg:
I couldn’t think of any better work. I mean, food is life. I mean, food and water, you need those things. And so to be able to work in community food systems and work with students, babies all the way up into senior citizens, you’re providing this opportunity for them to really grow and love in the community that they belong to.

Shelley Jenck:
To connect people in ways that might not seem obvious to them that they are health promoting, and that’s really the goal. We want this to be something that is a natural extension of their day to day life, it becomes their default because it’s just the way that the community is shaped, it’s how people here live.