Share Our Strength provides seed funds for Native American communities

Share Our Strength provides seed funds for Native American communities

WASHINGTON – Share Our Strength, a longtime partner of the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health, has invested $1 million over two years to expand the scope of the Family Spirit evidence-based home visiting program to promote early childhood nutrition, prevent hunger, and bolster Indigenous foodways. Share Our Strength’s investment will allow for new educational modules, called Family Spirit Nurture, to be delivered within thousands more Native American homes to promote the best possible nutrition in early life and enable the organizations to work jointly to raise awareness about diverse and sustainable Native-led programs, practices, and policies to end child hunger during the critical first years of life.

Over 25 years ago, Share Our Strength provided the seed funds to launch the development of Family Spirit, a maternal and child health home visiting program that supports Native American families nationally. The current grant will enable additional training in the Family Spirit Nurture program for at least 200 home visitors across 40 Tribal communities by March 2023. The grant will further support the development of a web-based app to share nutrition messages, goal-setting strategies, recipes, and nutrition resources with Native families. With the home visiting sessions and the app, more than 4,000 Native American families will be served through this investment.

“The Family Spirit home visiting program promotes nutrition and food security and serves Native American parents and their children from pregnancy to age 3—the most critical 1,000-day period of human growth. This evidence-based program celebrates the strengths and assets within Native communities by connecting Native home visitors with families. This powerful community-based approach will help ensure Native American children have the best opportunity available for a healthy life ahead,” said Caron Gremont, Early Childhood Director for Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry Campaign.

Native American communities are disproportionately affected by inequality in food justice, which often leads to health challenges such as diabetes, heart disease, and other nutrition-related illness. At the same time, Native communities have inherent strengths and are working to tap resources such as rich traditional foodways that support children’s nutrition.

Evidence published last year in JAMA Pediatrics showed Family Spirit Nurture as the first early childhood home visiting program to establish healthy infant feeding and achieve healthy growth status for infants in the first year of life. Over the past 15 years, three randomized controlled trials of the original Family Spirit program documented other important results including increased parenting knowledge and involvement; decreased maternal depression and substance use; decreased emotional and behavioral problems of mothers; and improved social, emotional and behavioral development for children.

The post Share Our Strength provides seed funds for Native American communities first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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