PHOTO: Courtesy of WLUK
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) — As 2023 comes to a close and 2024 is just around the corner, Wello is reflecting on triumphs of the past year and looking forward to it’s upcoming goals.
Wello’s purpose is to co-create community conditions that are fair and just to drive high levels of health and well-being for all. Wello has been part of the Greater Green Bay Community since 2018.
Cultivating Community; Wello’s well-being-based food system fed over 6,000 people in 2023 though the produce box program. The program connects people in need to local fresh fruits and vegetables, and sometimes things like honey, syrup, and eggs.
“With Cultivating Community, we have been connecting with a lot of state and national partners to think about the things that are going really well in Brown County and how farmers, people, and organizations are working together to strengthen our food system,” said Natalie Bomstad, Executive Director of Wello. “We’re excited to get into 2024 to see the ripple effects of what connecting to those state and national resources is going to do to improve the lives of folks in Brown County.”
Recently, Wello applied for additional funding for the Cultivating Community and produce box program. If that funding is awarded, the hope is to expand Cultivating Community’s four distribution sites, to 10 distribution sites.
Wello’s Yield to your Neighbor program has also seen success this year. In Yield to Your Neighbor, Wello partners with local law enforcement to pay special attention to making sure drivers ‘yield to their neighbor’ before driving through a crosswalk. In 2023, there were three countywide crosswalk enforcement operations held in June, August and October.
This year, compliance in the Yield to your Neighbor campaign increased to 88%; compared to last year’s 79%.
In 2023, Wello conducted their bi-annual Community Health and Wellbeing Survey. Wello is currently analyzing data from the 2023 survey before the official results come out in February 2024. However, in 2023 there was a 46% increase in number of responses since the last survey in 2021.
“Not only did the responses increase, but when we looked at demographics of the survey and demographics of our county, we’re getting much closer to having that be a mirror image of each other,” said Bomstad.
In 2023, Wello was one of 25 global leaders that was invited by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation into a long-term cohort to help collaborate on how to create well-being across the United States. The 18-month cohort began at the end of September and will go through the end of March 2025.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is a national organization that is solely devoted to health and wellbeing of the United States.
Looking forward to 2024, Wello is looking at ways to improve school meals.
“Transformation of school meals is really about making sure that every kid has access, since having food in your belly is foundational to being able to learn,” said Bomstad. “We also want to make sure that our schools have the capacity, resources, and training in their culinary department to cook, produce, and get healthy options on those lunch trays for our kids.”
Another goal Wello has for 2024 is strengthening community and clinical partnerships.
“We know healthcare access and healthcare itself it about 20% of the equation of what makes a person healthy or well,” said Bomstad. ” We have a couple of different projects in the hopper right now looking at expanding our community health workers, looking at different models of community care, and recognizing what we can do at a community level to support individuals.”
In 2024, the team at well will increase from five to eight employees.
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