Page 146 - South Mississippi Living - February, 2022

FINAL SAY
CHRISTIN
LeBoeuf Executive Director, American Heart
Association Mississippi Gulf Coast
At the American Heart Association, we talk a lot about living a healthy lifestyle: eating smarter, moving more, knowing your numbers, and giving up nicotine. For many of us, those are lifestyle changes we can make (albeit, sometimes grudgingly).
But for many in our community, attaining improved health is more challenging. Without the right infrastructure and resources, simply knowing the importance of a healthy lifestyle just isn’t actionable.
Imagine you’re a single mother. Your kids are your life. You work two jobs. You’re doing your best to ensure your children get enough to eat and get an education. You don’t have a car,
so when you need food, you rely on others for transportation to the grocery store. When you can’t find a ride, you must walk to the nearest store, which is a few miles away because you live in a food desert. Your neighborhood doesn’t have sidewalks, and the lighting isn’t great. Just getting to the store safely is dicey. When you finally get to the store, you find that fresh, healthy produce is expensive, and you’re not sure how to prepare it anyway. For the same money you’d spend on three days’ worth of produce, you can feed your two sons for a week on ready-made, less expensive foods that you know aren’t as healthy. You decide to take the path of least resistance and hope for better days.
This isn’t just fiction for many on the Coast. It’s everyday life. It illustrates that we can tell people how to live a healthy life all day long, but until we give them the tools to make real choices to improve their health, that knowledge isn’t very useful.
That’s why we’ve broadened our focus. We’re still the science- based organization that’s been arming patients and healthcare providers with life-saving, evidence-based knowledge for nearly 100 years, but we also realize there’s more work to do. At the community level, we must drive increased health equity, better access to quality healthcare, enhanced awareness of chronic disease risk factors, and real nutrition security.
One such project I’m proud to announce involves an incredible investment by the American Heart Association and Voices for Healthy Kids (VFHK) in the health of the Coast. Thanks to
a sizable grant from VFHK, several non-profits will get an opportunity to amplify their voices on key health issues facing Gulfport through a multi-layered policy campaign. Through this grant, we hope to empower Mississippi non-profits to become effective advocates for those in our community who often find themselves voiceless.
This is just one of many projects we’re pursuing here to improve access to healthy food, provide self-monitored blood pressure equipment for Medicaid patients, stop the youth vaping epidemic, and advocate for expanded Medicaid access.
There’s much work to be done, but we believe everyone has a right to good health. We’re in this together, and a rising tide raises all ships. We welcome you to join us as we launch this new focus on improving health equity in our community, and we encourage you to help us truly create a world of longer, healthier lives.
146 | February 2022
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