Donating 100,000 Pounds of Produce, Cultivating an Immeasurable Amount of Hope
How Sarah Ramirez and the Be Healthy Tulare Team Are Harvesting HEALTH and Hope
By Mae Velasco, HeroFuel® Reporter
Tucked away in a corner of the nation is where 25 percent of all the United States’ food is grown. There sits Tulare County in California, and although humble in population and infrastructure, Tulare has something to be proud about: in 2001, it became the most productive county in the nation in agricultural revenue. In 2015, Tulare surpassed $8 billion in crop value.
But ironically, as they’re feeding the country, they can barely feed themselves. Tulare ranks the highest in childhood poverty in California, with almost 41 percent of children under 18 living below the poverty line, Sarah Ramirez, PhD, MPH, MA, said.
The numbers are staggering. And while the poverty of people is at least acknowledged in major municipalities, Tulare is overlooked, sandwiched in the nowhere zone between cities — that is, until Ramirez and her husband, high school teacher David G. Terrel, co-founded Be Healthy Tulare, a grassroots and volunteer-driven organization that has donated 100,000 pounds of food, held interactive cooking and waste-free kitchen classes and has empowered the community in the last six years.
Sarah Ramirez is not only the co-founder of Be Healthy Tulare, she is also the executive director of FoodLink for Tulare County, and both groups work together through a similar mission, which is to bring food literacy, food donations, and nutritional and educational resources to those in need.
“Rather than focusing on the resources we don’t have, we focus on the resources we do have, which is the people, the experience, the knowledge and the incredible growing environment,” Ramirez said.
What motivated her life mission? Oddly enough, it was death. Of people around her — and almost her own.
“What really shaped me was death. Death of family members. Early and premature death of family members who did work as agricultural workers. I grew up the daughter of farm workers. My parents worked in the field. And my Dad is basically disabled for the rest of his adult life,” she said. “That was as a result of health conditions, as well as injuries, he experienced while working in the field. And so, that was really the motivation.”
She watched their pain and strife, she watched them go through disabilities, and even disrespect. As agricultural workers without formal educations, she watched them get mistreated and devalued by other community members.
Ramirez realized there was something more than medical treatment or the lack thereof that impacted health. She began to ask the question, “What is that?” What did she need to do to improve the conditions of her home? Initially, she had gone to college to become a medical doctor, but another family loss jarred her.
Her Dad’s twin brother had died of diabetes, a preventable disease if Tulare could provide its people with a healthier lifestyle.
“To see my uncle in a casket…he was my Dad’s twin brother. To really see this could be my Dad? It seemed unfair to lose a family member so young. He passed away two weeks after his 40th birthday. At this point, I’ve now lived longer than he did,” Ramirez said.
So, she forewent her path to medical school and began to focus on what socio-economic-ecological discussions needed to happen to improve Tulare from within. What did it mean to become a healthy community?
Ramirez began to engage people in these conversations back in a time when these kinds of talks didn’t even exist. But there was one more moment that solidified her track to Be Healthy Tulare.
“I had a major car accident. In fact, I have no memory of it. I remember everything that morning leading up to the accident, and then I have flashes of images while being rescued,” Ramirez said.
She was actually finishing her doctoral dissertation during the weeks the accident occurred. Her memories of her crash were as scattered as her papers across the field and the glass across her car, yet, there was one resounding thought that she couldn’t let go of:
“It was really after that I began to question. Here I am, working my tail off, and am I getting closer to the type of work I want to do in my community? Am I getting closer to feeling like we’re actually making a difference?” She said.
Ramirez had “a hell of a lot of downtime” to contemplate during her recovery. Turns out the answer was quite simple.
She was talking to her husband, explaining what people currently did in public health and how everyone is looking for other people to propose solutions to various problems, but, there weren’t people straight from the community present to offer these answers.
“So, he jokingly laughed and said, ‘Well, what do you want to do about it?’” Ramirez laughed herself. “And I said, I want to go pick fruit.”
They had already been researching gleaning projects, which involve harvesting surplus produce from local farms and redistributing them for an overall community food security.
It was as easy as picking fruit. She and her husband began riding around on their bikes with signs and found local food banks to work with. And where did they take these efforts? Back to their hometown, Pixley, one of the smallest and poorest in Tulare.
“There’s a lot of helplessness and hopelessness, and I would say a majority of it is learned because there are little opportunities for jobs, for self-improvement, little opportunity to promote health,” Ramirez said. “We really felt like we needed to go home. We needed to go back to our hometown of Pixley.”
Today, Be Healthy Tulare has grown immensely.
In 2014, the community was able to donate 20,000 pounds of produce. This year, they teetered past 100,000 pounds — impressive, considering Tulare is a tiny army.
More than the numbers, Ramirez is most proud of the youth that are involved in reshaping their home. She encourages them to come to her with their ideas, no matter how crazy they may seem. These kids, who grew up listening to their parents urging them not to get into agricultural work due to the high stress and low reward, are now giving back.
At a corn picking event, 150 volunteers, mostly students, volunteered the first year. At the latest event, more than 400 kids showed up to collectively pick 22,000 pounds of corn. Ramirez spoke of some students taking entire days off to help when they held a blueberry picking event, a difficult fruit to pick, when they learned that the blueberries would be going to the summer lunch program for kids in need.
The youth have been so passionate about these efforts, that with their help and guidance from Mission Oak High School teacher Michaelpaul Mendoza, they’ve rebranded their student-service campaign as “Harvesting Hope.”
“I am most inspired by their ability to show up and be present. It’s incredible,” Ramirez said.
There was a moment with a student that resonates with her even today.
One student that Ramirez approached broke down crying, saying that until Ramirez spoke to her class, she never realized what was happening in her own home — her mother, an agricultural worker, was choosing not to eat so that her children could. And small world, the student’s mother happened to be a person Ramirez had gone to high school with. Ramirez’s passion was only renewed and fired up.
“It’s home. We want to inspire that service spirit and we want to inspire that spirit that spirit of compassion in our community,” Ramirez said.
Be Healthy Tulare’s next mission is to create a mobile pantry using a truck and trailer.
“I need a truck and trailer for my mobile pantry. Just think: truck and trailer for my mobile pantry,” Ramirez laughed when asked how people could help.
But in all sincerity, Be Healthy Tulare is grateful for not only the heart and efforts of volunteers in the fields, but across the country. People who have heard of their story have helped however they could, from designing logos or even just spreading the world.
And for Ramirez and the Be Healthy Tulare mission, it’s more than about cultivating food security. It’s about cultivating dignity and hope.
“Really, the idea is that all human beings matter, right? We want to recognize all human beings are deserving of love, deserving of dignity, and that hope really matters. And I really, really, really believe that love is infectious, and I feel like it ripples out into the community,” she said, and while a polished, strong and professional woman, tremors of emotion shook in her voice as she spoke passionately. “By us being able to demonstrate through our actions and to help promote hope and dignity in our community, and we do so from a place of love, that changes our community.”
“It changes the social fabric. It changes our relationship to one another, and we need that now more than ever,” Ramirez said.
Want to learn more about how you can do your part? Visit their website here.
