WIC Innovates to Support Maternal and Child Health During the Pandemic
May 7, 2021, 1:00 PM, Posted by Jamie Bussel
As unemployment and food insecurity rates soared, WIC adapted to protect access for the families it serves but more support is needed.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bo-Yee Poon and her children left China, where she had been studying Tai Chi for 16 years, to return home to Vermont. What she thought would be a short stay before returning to her studies turned into a much longer one as all flights back to China were grounded indefinitely. With a home but no immediate job prospects in Vermont, Bo-Yee managed to access insurance through Vermont Health Connect, which fortunately made her and her family eligible for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).
ASHEVILLE - As the COVID-19 pandemic bore down, MANNA FoodBank CEO Hannah Randall saw firsthand a sharp rise in food insecurity, and it hasn t relented.
The nonprofit and its partner agencies last March served 128,690 people in Western North Carolina, a 93% jump from February to the onset of the pandemic. For us, throughout this pandemic, we just pulled out all the stops all the time, looking for every resource we could find to make sure people had a meal at home, she said.
Now, more than a year later, the numbers have shown no signs of declining. Complicating the work to get needed food assistance to hundreds of thousands of regional clients is a supply chain that seems reluctant to stabilize.
Letter: Make WIC work better for moms
Published: 5/6/2021 8:00:19 AM
The anthropologist Margaret Mead allegedly said that the first sign of civilization of humans was an ancient femur, a bone in the leg, which had been fractured and healed because in order to survive a broken femur the wounded would have needed others to correctly bind the injury and protect the fallen while he or she rested for at least six weeks.
While the attribution of this has been contested, and the word “civilization” is vague and mired by its racist use in defense of colonialism, I think Mead’s analysis makes an insightful point. A society’s success is not just about advancement in processes and technologies for bettering and prolonging human life, but in the care it extends to those most vulnerable.
To thrive mothers and children need, in the first 1,000 days, food and good nutrition, access to quality health care, paid family and medical leave, child care and the tax credits that allow families to keep extra cash to pay for household necessities.