Passport Health Plan has signed on with Bluegrass Harvest, a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program administered by Community Ventures, to sponsor weekly deliveries of locally grown produce for low-income residents of Lexington’s East End community.
Sandy Noble Canon
The program, which is expected to benefit up to 70 families, will include 20 weekly boxes of freshly harvested fruits and vegetables from local farms this spring and summer. In addition, the CSA box recipients will have access to additional health and wellness-oriented events throughout the five-month program, including cooking demonstrations, exercise classes, food tastings, meet-the-farmer events and more, said Sandy Noble Canon, president of Bluegrass local food initiatives for Community Ventures.
The sponsorship program is aimed at not only improving access to healthy food in disadvantaged communities, but also encouraging healthy behaviors that can lower health costs and improve outcomes, while at the same time supporting local farmers, said Michael Rabkin, communications director for Passport Health Plan.
“If you think about ways to improve health and quality of life, there’s only so much that going to the doctor can do,” Rabkin said. “We know that food directly impacts someone's health, whether it's losing weight or preventing diabetes or lowering someone’s heart rate.”
Bluegrass Harvest has worked in recent years with businesses such as the University of Kentucky, White House Clinics, ARH and Bluegrass Care Navigators to provide employees with access to weekly CSA shares of local produce during the growing season. This is the first time the organization has partnered with an insurance plan to sponsor its CSA produce delivery, Canon said.
Passport Health Plan, a nonprofit organization that administers Medicaid benefits in Kentucky, first launched in the greater Louisville area in 1997 and expanded to offer its services statewide starting in 2014. Passport has worked with farmers’ markets in Eastern Kentucky and similar programs in Louisville to improve access to healthy local food, but this will be its first sponsored CSA effort in Lexington’s East End.
“We are a community-based plan, and we are constantly looking to find different ways to reach out and to help Kentuckians to improve their health,” Rabkin said.
Participants in the sponsored CSA program do not have to be Passport clients, Rabkin said, although the health plan does have members who live in the East End community.
For more information on Bluegrass Harvest, check online at www.cvky.org/bluegrass-food.