Columbia College, partnered with St. John Baptist Church and the Square Foot Gardening Foundation, to develop a model project to improve diabetes prevention in Columbia, SC.

According to the 2010 Department of Health and Environmental Control Richland County Profile: 25.4% of Richland county is obese; 59.3% do not meet physical activity recommendations; 92.7% do not meet fruit and vegetable daily recommendations; 14,529 adults in Richland county suffer from diabetes; diabetes is the 7th leading cause of death in Richland county; Medicare paid for 50% of direct costs for diabetes related hospitalizations and ER visits.

The task ahead seemed improbable. And then along came Jamie Opdyke, an AmeriCorps*VISTA at Columbia College. September, 2011, Jamie represented the College as part of the 29203 Diabetes Coalition in Charleston, SC. In Charleston, she met the feisty Mary Hart. This meeting changed her entire VISTA year. She came back with a vision. What if we brought together the healthy families program, Crock Pot cooking, walking programs, and took advantage of an 11 month growing season, and did it through a faith-based organization that people in our community trust, embedding support through campus-wide service-learning?

Seven months and 15 planning meetings later, Columbia College students, staff, and church community members kicked off her vision at St. John Baptist Church. She started earlier, coordinating “the ease of crock pot cooking” at a Saturday program where she launched the walking program. She enlisted children to measure ingredients for mouth-watering rice pudding, while parent watched. The children learned to make healthy food, creating ownership. Then, after Zumba warm-up, 50 community members walked 1-3 miles returning to the smell of nutmeg, cream and raisins enveloping the room, wetting our taste buds and kicking off a twice monthly event. With Palmetto Richland Hospital’s Office of Community Service, we trained members of St. John as “walking captains.”

We focused next on community gardens. Partnering with the Square Foot Garden Foundation, we built fourteen community gardens, the first two at Columbia College to certify. We began at St. John with the pre-school. We asked the kids what vegetables and fruits they liked to eat. Then we dropped to 2 gardens, giving them their first chance to plant. They planted seeds into each “square foot” that have grown into vegetables they pick for lunch and snacks. They share this with their families at home.

March 30 and 31 was our “Big Dig”. March 30 we held a community dinner cooked with vegetables to be grown in the garden. We also handed out 50 donated Crock Pots . On March 31, engaging over 100 students and community volunteers we dropped 10 gardens, 4 fruit trees, Muscatine and Blackberry bushes for the Church and community.

We completed our initial goal with St. John and May, 2012 begin again with Grace Christian Church. This will lay the foundation to move deliberately through each faith-based organization in 29203. Our project intends to be a model, now funded by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).