WHO WE ARE AND OUR MISSION
OUR MISSION IS TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE ELIMINATION OF THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN FOOD DESERTS AND POOR HEALTH FOR RURAL RESIDENTS IN THE GREATER SACRAMENTO AREA.
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My name is Jasmine Stewart-Oliver. I am the founder of OliveMoore, a nonprofit focused on eliminating food deserts in the rural communities of The Greater Sacramento Area. This became my mission around 2013, when I competed in the 27th CSU Student Research Competition, a research competition for which I won first place. I did my research project on the racial disparities in access to healthy foods and was introduced to the term Food Desert. A food desert is a low income census track with limited access to supermarkets and/or large scale grocery stores. In my study I found that Blacks were almost two times as likely to live in a food desert census tract (14%) compared to a non-food desert census tract (8%).
I have been asked why rural areas? And the answer is simple. According to the USDA, (1) there are 6,529 food desert census tracts in the continental United States. That represents a total of 13.6 million people. Roughly, 18% of this almost 14 million citizen live in a rural community. Food deserts in rural communities also have more drastic criteria to meet in terms of distance to a supermarket or large scale grocery store compared to urban food deserts. For instance, the Healthy Food Financing Initiative considers an urban food desert a low-income census tract without a supermarket or large scale grocery store within a single mile. This is 10 times further for rural areas. Food deserts in rural communities are defined as low-income census tracts where there are no supermarkets or large grocery stores within 10 miles. This is neither walkable nor reasonable for low-income families to access healthy or fresh foods. Here in lies OliveMoore’s mission! OliveMoore is unique in that it will have three branches: education, community outreach, and research. We will provide family based nutrition education; not only about healthy eating but about the links between eating and chronic disease. We will also have a community outreach component concentrated on building and sustaining wall gardens, health screenings, and resources connections such as: Covered California sign up support, and SNAP benefit sign up support. We will also have a focus on policy informing research. OliveMoore will use participant data to inform local and state policy about issues impacting the communities we serve. source (1) http://www.ers.usda.gov/dataFiles/Food_Access_Research_Atlas/Download_the_Data/Archived_Version/archived_documentation.pdf
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HEALTHY
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Traveling resources to rural areas, rather than force residents to travel to resources will increase the usefulness of the OliveMoore organization and insure proper delivery of goods, services, and education to those in need. The commitment to this necessity, not only makes OliveMoore unique but makes this organization imperative to the health and vitality of the state of California and therefore the nation. Our mission is not only to cater to the individual but to provide the entire community, including schools and nursing homes, with holistic and realistic options for their lives and institutions. Through the continued effort of OliveMoore, California can see the end of food deserts.
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