Over 20 Bronx Bodegas Participate in Two Day Healthy Bodega Initiative to Promote Healthier Food and Beverages

Bodega owners attending the Healthy Bodega Training.

Mitch Klein casually walked around the television studio housed discreetly inside Lebron's Restaurant Equipment and Business Machines store awaiting the bodega owners to attend the first ever, Healthy Bodega Training seminar. Mitch would be the trainer for the two day, nine hour sessions that were held on the evenings of Tuesday, August 4 and Wednesday, August 5. Getting to this starting point of the Healthy Bodega Initiative had been many months in the making. Launched by Bronx Health REACH, a program of the Institute for Family Health, in partnership with the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network, Inc. (HITN) and The Bodega Association of the United States (ASOBEU), the Healthy Bodega Training is a new and important part of the Healthy Bodega Initiative to address the obesity epidemic plaguing New York City’s most vulnerable neighborhoods.

This in-depth Healthy Bodega training was created to focus on business strategies, food handling and marketing/promotion practices. It is anticipated that the training will lead to an increase in the supply and demand for healthier food and beverages for customers by providing bodega owners with the tools and information to make offering healthy food and drink options a successful business in the high need, low income communities in which they are located. The training focused on best practices for becoming a H.E.R.O. bodega (healthy, educated, responsive, and operational). Topics covered included: the requirements of being a vendor for the SNAP and WIC programs, compliance with alcohol and tobacco vendor licensing, and appropriate responses to dealing with New York City agencies if a bodega receives a fine. The two day training was videotaped and will be accessible online through a password protected link.

Mitch expressed his confidence in the impact of this training. He said, "I have been doing trainings for forty years all across the country, and over the next two evenings I will be talking about how the small bodega can make a difference and compete against the big box stores. We have great success stories after doing similar programs in Miami, Orlando, and Philadelphia, and these bodegas can thrive and grow their business."

Mr. Ramon Murphy, who is not only the President of The Bodega Association of the United States, but has owned his bodega for twenty years noted, "I hope to see those bodega owners attending the training realize that they can have more healthy food offerings for the community. He went on to point out that “a partnership between bodega owners and the community can help to make the Bronx healthier."

While many bodega owners have been willing to participate in efforts to stock healthy food at the behest of healthy food advocates like Bronx Health REACH and others, many owners have not been able to succeed at selling healthy food because they lack the necessary information and tools to market and sell these healthy foods. The training not only provided much of the needed information, but plans are underway to develop and implement education and incentives to make healthy foods affordable and desirable.

The work is funded by a three year REACH (Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health) grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Institute for Family Health/Bronx Health REACH is a founding member of ‘Not62 – The Campaign for a Healthy Bronx’, a new initiative, responding to the Bronx being ranked 62 out of the 62 counties in New York State by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Ranking Report since 2009.

Just a few minutes past the scheduled start time the studio was filled with over twenty bodega owners taking their seats and donning headphones since most would need the presentation to be translated into Spanish. Mr. Murphy greeted the bodega owners and thanked them for taking time out of their busy schedule to attend the training. He spoke about how the Healthy Bodega initiative would not only be an economic benefit for their bodegas, but also a healthy benefit for the community. 

Prior to holding the training one of the stated goals Bronx Health REACH, HITN and the Bodega Association had was that the training should be practical and useful for the bodega owners. Following the two day training Julia Mair from HITN expressed how the Bodega Association Board members were excited about the fact that the Healthy Bodega training was useful and meaningful to them and the other bodega owners in attendance.

The feedback from the bodega owners was positive. Some of the bodega owners requested more training and expressed their willingness to participate in more training sessions since the topics discussed could be applied to the day to day work in their bodegas. Attendance for the second evening increased as some of the bodega owners brought in people who also worked in the stores. Those bodega owners felt that the information at the seminar was worth having others from their bodegas attend.

The Healthy Bodega Training seminar is a significant step towards offering the community a better selection of healthy food choices. As more bodega owners attend future Healthy Bodega Training seminars, the changes they make in their bodega will enable them to create sustainable practices that mean good business for them and the health for the community.

Stark Health Disparities Between Bedford Stuyvesant and Bay Ridge/Dyker Heights

Photo via Flickr by Eli Duke

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene continues to address health disparities across New York City. Below is an article from Raven Rakia comparing the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn to the Bay Ridge/Dyker Heights neighborhood and the stark health disparities between the two areas.

To read the full Community Health Profile for Bed Stuy click here

To read the full Community Health Profile for Bay Ridge click here

In New York City’s black neighborhoods, poverty, housing issues, and asthma go together

By Raven Rakia on 16 Oct 2015

It’s a tale of two cities. New data from the New York City Department of Health shows the health of New Yorkers can vary drastically by neighborhood and is linked to race, housing issues, and poverty.

Earlier this week, the Department of Health published community public-health profiles that take an in-depth look at each neighborhood in Brooklyn (other boroughs will be coming over the next two months). The profiles detail the poverty rate, access to health care, life expectancy, strokes, asthma, mental illness, and cause of death for each neighborhood’s population. They reveal the stark reality of how health in New York varies along race and income lines.

Living in Brooklyn’s predominantly black neighborhoods comes with an increased rate of asthma hospitalizations. In all but one of Brooklyn’s predominantly black neighborhoods, the number of asthma hospitalizations was higher than the borough and city average for both children and adults. The whiter the neighborhood got, the fewer asthma hospitalizations there were.

The difference is stark: In Bed-Stuy, a neighborhood that is 64 percent black, there were 531 avoidable adult asthma hospitalizations per 100,000 people and 54 child asthma hospitalizations per 10,000 people. In the Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights neighborhood, which is 60 percent white, there were 94 avoidable adult asthma hospitalizations per 100,000 people and nine child asthma hospitalizations per 10,000 people.

The four neighborhoods in Brooklyn with the highest avoidable adult asthma hospitalization rates are all over 83 percent black and Latino, and they also have some of the highest poverty rates in the borough. While showing the connections between race, poverty, and health on a microscopic level, the data also offers a glimpse into some of the reasons why the differences may be so high. In Brooklyn, most of the levels of particulate matter (as a form of air pollution) range from 8 to 9.5 micrograms per cubic meter. When it comes to housing quality, in six neighborhoods, 70 percent or more rented homes have at least one maintenance defect. All six of those neighborhoods are predominantly black and Latino, and four out of the six neighborhoods have high rates of asthma hospitalizations. Poor housing quality could mean the presence of mold or asbestos, which are associated with respiratory illnesses.

The most important thing about all of this data is that it shows a complete picture of how the neighborhood you live in can affect how healthy you are. As NYC’s Health Commissioner Mary Bassett told CBS New York, “The health of a neighborhood doesn’t just rely on the decisions an individual makes, but on the resources that are available to them in that neighborhood.”

New Yorkers, if you want to be healthy, it’s going to be much easier if you’re white and can afford to live in a richer neighborhood. For everyone else: good luck.

El Diario Features Healthy Bodegas

Photo: Gerard Romo/El Diario

Hylonkys LaChapelle, owner of Gerard Minimarket is participating in the Healthy Bodega Initiative.

The January 30, 2016 issue of El Diario featured an article about the Healthy Bodega Initiative, a partnership between Bronx Health REACH, The Bodega Association of the United States (ASOBEU), and the Hispanic Information and Telecommunications Network, Inc. (HITN). The article featured the owner of Gerard Minimarket, a bodega that participated in the August training, and featured conversations with  Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., ASOBEU President Ramon Murphy, and Bronx Health REACH Director Charmaine Ruddock.

Hylonkys LaChapelle, the owner of Gerard Minimarket located at 740 Gerard Avenue, Bronx, New York spoke of making changes to her bodega after attending the August training. She described re-arranging and moving the best looking apples and bananas to more prominent areas of shelf space.  The result is shoppers purchasing more fruits. “Now, two boxes of bananas (approximately 30 pounds of product) is sold in a matter of a day,” said LaChapelle.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. spoke about the #Not62 campaign (the Bronx is ranked as the least healthy of 62 of 62 counties in New York State) and how those healthy bodegas that participated in the August Healthy Bodega Training will now be a “part of the solution offering healthy alternatives to their customers.”

Charmaine Ruddock, Director of Bronx Health REACH provided background on how the training program emphasizes the importance of including healthy alternatives at the deli counter such as low fat cheese and low fat mayonnaise in sandwiches, and water offered rather than soda.

You can read the full article here.

The next two- day Healthy Bodega Training will be held on March 8th and March 9th from 5 to 9:30 p.m. If you know a bodega in your community that would benefit from this training, please contact Zulay at the Bodega Association at (212) 928-0252.