SCFSC News

Updates and articles from our workgroups

Each SCFSC workgroup posts regularly and you can find them all right here. Here are some of our most recent updates.

Check out our Smith County Food Security Council October 2022 Newsletter on our Facebook page.

The Smith County Food Security Council and other local organizations participated in the Episcopal Health Foundation Facilitation Training. Participants learned how to utilize liberating structures to facilitate meetings that provide inclusiveness and equity. We also engaged in learning and skill-building activities to lead more effective and efficient meetings.

Our Partners in Health team shared the goal of increasing Food Insecurity screening and connecting patients to food resources in the East Texas community. Attendees learned how the partnership was developed, early results, lessons learned, and plans to extend the program, focusing on how other communities might develop similar programs. Please click on the link below for more information about the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty.

KETK shares about our September 2022 Produce Drop and Community Resource Roadshow which served more than 780 members of our East Texas Community.

We are so grateful for our rapidly growing coalition and cannot express the joy this brings us. We felt that all of our members new and seasoned needed something to refresh their minds what the Smith County Food Security Council is about. This video provides in depth information on our coalition to help everyone get to know us more please feel free to share with anyone and everyone!

We know many in our community need extra help right now and we are working on collecting as many resources as we can. Thanks to Sarah Malone and Gloria Bell, our children and schools workgroup co-chairs, for putting together this list of where children can receive free lunches. Please feel free to share with anyone you think might need it.

Follow the link to see what great things this organization is doing in Boulder to provide gardening education and feed the food insecure in the community.

The Smith County Food Security Council's Urban Agriculture Workgroup has compiled a list of local farmers and farmer's markets. Our hope is that it will help connect community members to locally grown food that is nutritious and affordable.

Hundreds of families came out to a new event offering free healthy produce and information about community resources. The Smith County Food Security Council and the East Texas Food Bank teamed up to put on the first “Produce Drop and Community Resource Roadshow” at New Days Community Church on Tuesday.

The SCFSC held our first Produce Drop and Community Resource Roadshow on August 13, 2019. The East Texas Food Bank provided produce for 893 families and 8 local organizations connected community members to needed healthcare services.

Smith County Food Security Council Founder and Chair Dr. Valerie Smith was honored with the Northeast Texas Public Health District's 2019 W.T. Doc Ballard Award for Excellence in Public Health.

The East Texas Food Bank (ETFB) announces the launch of their new Partners in Health Program. The Partners in Health Program developed in collaboration with St. Paul Children?s Medical Clinic and UT Health Northeast addresses food insecurity, a major ...

Despite increasing the medication and insulin of a patient with diabetes, Dr. Michele Bosworth found the man’s condition was only getting worse. The patient suffered multiple heart attacks. Soon, both doctor and patient were growing weary of what could be done to improve his condition. “One day he said to me, ‘Well, Dr. Bosworth, I can only eat what I get from the food bank,” said Bosworth, a family physician and patient safety officer at UT Health North Campus Tyler. “And I thought, wow, it didn’t really matter what I was prescribing to him. He only had the resources available to him that he could get from the food bank.”

Tyler nurse Celeste Fisher grew up eating one meal a day because her family could not afford to buy food. Her dad usually got the most to eat because he worked a manual labor job and needed the energy. “It wasn’t until the fifth-grade year that I realized breakfast and lunch were normal parts of the day,” she said. “I got those at school, but in the summer we had supper only.”

UT Health East Texas' North Tyler Pediatric Clinic recently joined the Partners in Health team helping their patients address food insecurity and improve their health.

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