Leadership Class serves up help to health institute with donation
A $12,400 donation will make it easier for families to have access to healthful food.
Dr. Kathy Selvaggi, of the Food Institute at the Butler Health System, said food isn’t available to feed families on an even playing field.
Selvaggi saw plans for its Food Institute through to completion, just as the United States — and other parts of the world — were starting to emerge from a harrowing public health crisis. In April 2022 the COVID-19 pandemic still cast a long shadow over many arenas of everyday life, and establishing the Food Institute would help ensure that Butler would receive more support in at least one arena.
“The planning for this actually predated COVID,” said Selvaggi, “And then COVID happened, and we didn’t know when COVID was ‘going to end,’ and so we said, ‘You know what? We just have to start sometime.’
“Throughout the United States, we have problems with diabetes and coronary artery disease and obesity,” she said. “And we’re hoping, that with really good nutrition education — and also providing fresh foods and healthy foods — that down the road we will actually change the incidence of these diseases.
“It’s not going to happen overnight, but we really want to change the way people look at food,” she said.
Leadership Butler County’s 2022 Class donated the funds. The money came from a spring dinner theater fundraiser and additional donations by local businesses. The leadership class, a program run through Butler County’s Chamber of Commerce, marked the donation with an event Thursday night. The money will provide food, eating utensils, nutrition education and other support to people BHS care providers have referred to the Food Institute for extra help, Selvaggi said.
Care providers would describe these clients as “food insecure,” meaning they lack reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food.
Director of pharmacy Matt Schnur said the scale of the problem struck him as eye-opening when Selvaggi presented it to the leadership class, of which he also serves as a member.
“You almost take for granted — people might not have access, not just to healthy foods, but even the basic utensils and pots and pans and things like that just to prepare them,” he said. “But that, in and of itself, is a larger issue that all kind of plays into the larger issue of food insecurity.”
The money raised by Leadership Butler County and the Food Institute’s work will supply items people would need just to prepare a healthy meal, he said.
Much of it involved reaching out to local businesses, explaining the cause and directly asking for support to try to raise additional funds, he said.
Each year Leadership Butler County chooses a nonprofit to receive a donation as part of their class project, said development and events manager Kris Bowser.
“I would just like to thank the class for their support and for choosing Butler Health System,” she added.
The donation will work toward ensuring the Food Institute can help clients as much as possible, especially when they are coming to the Food Institute for help, said BHS nutrition liaison Breanna Lamberger. Being able to provide supplies to the best of the institute’s ability makes a difference, she said.
“Whether it’s kitchen utensils, vegetable peelers, Zoodlers — you name it — we have it on hand for people,” she said. “And just the healthy food that we want to be able to distribute … It’s all really important for long-term health, because that’s really what we’re interested in is the long-term health of our patients.”
