Faith-based groups making climate, health a priority: Public health joins faith groups on food access, sustainability
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* Julia Haskins

Across faith and religious traditions, worshipers are often taught that they have a moral obligation to take care of themselves, their communities and the planet. As climate change threatens communities in the U.S. and throughout the world, public health and faith-based groups are relying on each other to create a safer, healthier environment.

Faith-based groups are well poised to join forces with the public health sector, according to Ellen Idler, PhD, director of the Religion and Public Health Collaborative at Emory University. The interdisciplinary program merges scholarship and service, providing real-world opportunities for students to explore the intersection of religion and public health.

![Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/nathealth/47/5/1.1/F1.medium.gif)

[Figure1](http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/47/5/1.1/F1)

People move piles of debris outside Clendenin Church of the Nazarene Community Center in June 2016 in Clendenin, West Virginia, following the flooding of a local river. As climate change touches the lives of more Americans, some faith-based groups are playing a greater role in environmental stewardship.

Photo by Ty Wright, courtesy Getty Images

“It’s that bigger, broader community level that gives people in religious institutions something very much in common with public health,” Idler told *The Nation’s Health.*

Faith-based groups are prime for public health initiatives, Idler said, pointing to numerous faith traditions’ history of social justice advocacy and rallying around human rights issues — many of which are also linked to environmental stewardship.

In a 2015 papal letter on the environment, “Ladauto si’,” Pope Francis called it a sin “for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate.” But it is not only Catholics, or Christians, for that matter, who are openly resisting climate change. In the 2016 Conference of the Parties 22 Interfaith Statement on Climate Change, more than 300 religious, spiritual and faith-based leaders — including the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Priestess Beatriz Schulthess, president of the Indigenous Peoples Ancestral Spiritual Council — urged divestment from fossil fuels and upholding the Paris Agreement, which seeks to curb climate change globally by keeping carbon emissions low.

While health is undoubtedly tied to climate change, such a crisis speaks to a sense of righteousness for people from religious backgrounds, according to Kara Ball, program director of ecoAmerica’s interfaith climate coalition, Blessed Tomorrow.

Climate change represents “a moral issue for people of faith,” Ball told *The Nation’s Health.* “It impacts those who are most vulnerable. It impacts children, the elderly, community members and the rest of creation.”

## Health, faith unite on food education

A common thread among environmentally motivated initiatives is increasing access to healthy, fresh food, a goal that is being accomplished with the cooperation of people from faith-based and public health backgrounds.

Food is an important climate change consideration. With climate change comes more frequent and more intense floods, droughts and storms, which can hurt food supplies. APHA’s Year of Climate Change and Health is drawing attention to food and agriculture this month, and U.S. communities and faith groups are highlighting them year-round.

Darriel Harris, MDiv, MA, bridged faith and public health communities as the former leader of the Baltimore Food and Faith Project, a program through the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. Harris sought to address food insecurity and poor nutrition, issues that disproportionately affect low-income community members in the city and across the country. The abundance of food deserts in particular makes for poor health outcomes: A 2015 report from the center found that 1 in 4 Baltimore County residents live in a food desert, or an area in which access to affordable, nutritious food is out of reach.

![Figure2](http://www.thenationshealth.org/http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/nathealth/47/5/1.1/F2.medium.gif)

[Figure2](http://www.thenationshealth.org/content/47/5/1.1/F2)

More faith-based organizations are recognizing the importance of climate change and are engaging on food sustainability.

Photo by Julief514, courtesy iStockphoto

The Baltimore Food and Faith Project began as an ecological initiative aimed at helping local faith-based groups understand the benefits of sustainable, organic farming with community gardens. However, Harris found that discussing nutrition provided an easier entry point to communicating environmental issues with religious constituents.

The program offers congregations an audit to assess food policies and related practices, as well as a summer curriculum on gardening for children. It has also provided grants to local congregations to start their own gardens or invest in other nutrition-focused initiatives.

The project brought another important issue to light: People knew that they should be eating nutritious foods such as fruits and vegetables, but did not see the deeper religious basis for doing so, Harris found. So he wrote a scripture-based curriculum for religious constituents, making the science behind nutrition more relatable to a faith-based audience. Harris is now testing the faith-based nutrition curriculum for his PhD dissertation at Johns Hopkins.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Food and Faith Project’s momentum has spilled into other facets of religious life, with some congregations taking steps to recycle, compost and use rain barrels, Harris said.

Nutrition and food access feed into larger environmental concerns about environmental stewardship and climate change among religious groups.

The Washington, D.C.-based Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism helps members make connections among food, environment and human health, according to associate director Barbara Weinstein, MA.

The center does not shy away from political activism in support of environmental protections, advocating for policies such as the Paris Agreement and the Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. Religious Action Center members, along with other Jewish groups in the D.C. area, were also well represented at the Peoples Climate March in April. Food justice and security are discussed alongside environmental sustainability, with congregants encouraged to reduce food waste, practice sustainable gardening at home and donate excess food to community members in need.

Food security is a matter of social justice, affecting people’s ability to lead healthy, productive lives, and disproportionately impacting minority communities, Weinstein said. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, 12.5 percent of American households, or 15.8 million, were food insecure at some point during 2015.

“I think many of the synagogues that do this work do it as part of a larger commitment to these issues that they sort of see as a package,” Weinstein told *The Nation’s Health,* in conjunction with initiatives such as installing solar panels or low-flow plumbing.

As the Latin American director for the interfaith environmental coalition GreenFaith, Neddy Astudillo, DMin, MDiv, travels the world helping Latin American congregations become more environmentally sustainable. But it is her work with immigrant communities in northern Illinois that illustrates the relationship between nutrition and the environment. Astudillo and her husband are the founders of the Angelic Organics Learning Center in Caledonia, Illinois, where they teach immigrants best practices for healthy, sustainable farming.

“The farm is not faith based, but it does create opportunities for people who want to connect with issues of ecology or stewardship or health from their own religion,” Astudillo told *The Nation’s Health.*

The farm serves as a learning opportunity for immigrants who may be unfamiliar with U.S. farming practices, as well as locally available produce, according to Astudillo.

She also partnered with the University of Wisconsin-Extension to bring nutrition classes to church congregants, emphasizing the importance of eating food that is healthy, local and seasonally available.

In southern California, the Faith-Based Wellness Program at the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine Center for Community Health works with local Muslim, Hispanic and black groups on a range of projects that address health disparities throughout the city, such as nutrition and food access. Similar to the Baltimore Food and Faith Project, the Faith-Based Wellness Program works primarily in communities that are in food deserts and need greater access to healthy, seasonal produce, with community gardening as a central component of such efforts.

Conducted through the California Department of Public Health, the program is funded by U.S. Department of Agriculture Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education.

The San Diego-based project is also comparable to the program in Baltimore in that it spurs conversations about scriptural teachings in regard to nutrition and the importance of caring for the body — a common theme across religious traditions, said Ramon Hernandez, DrPH, MPH, associate director of the Center for Community Health. Gardening illuminates the relationship between the environment and stewardship, with discussions about air quality, soil and climate change all tied to health and wellness.

According to Hernandez, the success of the center’s public health initiatives within religious communities comes from building strong relationships with local institutions. A project of the County of San Diego Healthy Works initiative, which addresses chronic disease and health equity, the Faith-Based Wellness Program supports the Live Well San Diego plan for promoting better health outcomes in the city.

One way the Faith-Based Wellness Program is working with San Diego’s growing Muslim community is through discussions about food waste, particularly in light of large, communal feasts such as the Iftar, the meal that Muslims eat after sunset during the month of Ramadan. With so much food prepared, the Iftar provides an educational opportunity for Muslim community members to learn about reducing food waste in mosques, as well as proper nutritional intake and hydration during a month of fasting.

Public health workers can look to faith communities for inspiration to organize initiatives around health promotion, according to Weinstein of the Religious Action Center.

“The faith community tends to be a really untapped resource,” she said. “If you think of what makes people motivated and committed, houses of worship are at their core places of community. It’s people coming together around shared values. It’s a ready-made constituency for the public health community to engage with.”

For more information on the Center for Community Health, visit [www.ucsdcommunityhealth.org](http://www.ucsdcommunityhealth.org). For more details on APHA’s Year of Climate Change and Health, visit [www.apha.org/climate](http://www.apha.org/climate).

*   Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association