Nurture Assists Low Income Families with $1000 Grant from Consumer Wellness Center

Tuesday, February 16, 2010 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: consumer wellness center, grants, health news

(NaturalNews) Nurture, a non-profit organization based in the Chicago area, has been selected as one of this year's Consumer Wellness Center (CWC) Nutritional Grant Program recipients. Operated entirely by volunteers, Nurture provides cooking classes and nutrition education for low-income families, teaching them the essentials of incorporating whole foods into their diets. The organization's goal is to supply the tools and resources necessary for poorer families to prepare simple, nutritious meals that fit within their tight budgets.

Kathryn Guylay, Executive Director of Nurture, oversees the roughly 70 volunteers that administer the organization's various programs. She holds a Master of Business Administration degree and is currently pursuing a certification in Nutritional counseling through the Trinity School of Natural Health. Among Nurture's board members are a holistic health educator, a certified personal trainer, a Registered Dietician, a PhD of nutrition and Registered Nurse, and many other intelligent individuals privy to health and nutrition.

Guylay and her team intend to use the grant award to launch a new program at their Highland Park, IL facility that will provide 40 expectant mothers with Nurture's life-changing curriculum. Nurture's curriculum has been tailored specifically for each individual age group and is now available in Spanish. This new program is called "Desde El Principio" and means "from the beginning" and will utilize the Spanish materials for the low-income, pregnant Hispanic women.

Each woman will receive a free rice cooker and will be taught how to cook nutritious meals with them, using four primary whole foods: whole grains, split peas, lentils, and fruits and vegetables. The program will be provided free of charge to the women, all of whom qualify for government assistance through food pantries and school lunch programs. The award money from the Consumer Wellness Center (www.ConsumerWellness.org) will be used entirely to purchase the rice cookers and the food needed for each cooking class.

"This is the kind of program that we are thrilled to support," said CWC Executive Director Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, also the editor of NaturalNews.com. "It is extremely rewarding to see these funds put to a positive use like this, empowering women with both the knowledge and the tools they need to pursue healthy living," Adams said.

Life skills development and nutritional knowledge

Nurture's mission statement incorporates philanthropic giving with various forms of nutritional education and training, as well as life skills development. Depending on individual needs, volunteers will teach concepts like basic cooking and kitchen skills, how to shop effectively and efficiently, and how to incorporate healthy physical activity into a busy and constrained lifestyle.

Nurture has already witnessed incredible success with many of the other programs it has conducted, including one at its Evanston, IL facility in which teen mothers were taught how to prepare nutritious homemade meals for themselves and their babies. As a result, women who completed the program were able to successfully incorporate the techniques they learned into their daily lives and benefit from them with better health. Many of the women also began to exercise more because of the increased energy they received from their improved diets.

Nurture's focus on teaching families about the benefits of protein-rich lentils and beans has also been highly successful, causing many who had never eaten them previously to begin integrating them into their regular diets following the program. Prior programs have resulted in participants eating these nutritious and affordable forms of protein up to five times a week after completing the program. Most participants also generally ate far more fruits and vegetables than they did prior to the program.

Healthy living is also very affordable

The beauty of Nurture's recipes is that they can all be prepared for roughly $1.50 per serving or less. Because they are simple, inexpensive, and nutritious, the recipes and the programs behind them have been extremely effective at actually changing behavior, which is the goal of any education program.

We at the CWC are honored to be able to support Nurture and its important new endeavor. By teaching people from various ethnicities and groups about proper nutrition and providing them with the foundational skills and tools to incorporate it into their daily lives, Nurture is helping to establish a sustainable framework of good health among the low-income population. We also commend them for creating programs that virtually all participants have indicated were fun, informative, and led to improved health and a better lifestyle.

We look forward to the photo updates that Nurture's Historian will be providing, documenting the progress of the program. We hope that our readers will enjoy this information as well as feel inspired to support this or other programs within their own communities.

If you would like to find out more about Nurture and its nutritional programs, please visit www.nurtureyourfamily.org.

Once again, we would like to congratulate Nurture for winning one of this year's awards!

For more information about the Consumer Wellness Center: www.ConsumerWellness.org