Stories
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Sparking Community Change
Tekeema Parson inspires those around her to reach for their best. Already committed to improving her own health through exercise and healthy nutrition, Tekeema created the Virtual Workout Crew to influence her network of online friends to do the same. At home in eastern North Carolina, Tekeema saw the Community Sparkplugs for a Healthy North [...]
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Just to See You Smile
Thomas Story rose in the middle of the night to take his place in a line of eastern North Carolinians, already 50-deep before dawn and certain to grow longer. For Story, 62, and 8,252 others seen by a dentist during one of 12 mobile clinics held by the North Carolina Dental Health Fund’s Missions of [...]
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On the Right TRACK
When four-year-old Nash Gates takes his mom on a hike, they move at his pace. And Heather Gates is just fine with that. “We have a lot to learn from what kids naturally see, if we take time to see the outdoors as they see it,” she says. With more than a million acres in [...]
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Caring for Neighbors
There’s standing room only in the small waiting room at Southside United Health Center, a Winston-Salem neighborhood clinic that in two years has brought comprehensive family medical care to 1,500 uninsured men, women and children. Inside, Dr. Richard Lord, a family physician, guides a family medicine resident from Wake Forest University School of Medicine in [...]
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Food, Fitness and Faith
For many North Carolinians, church is the center of their community. Now, through Partners in Health and Wholeness, an initiative of the North Carolina Council of Churches, churchgoers are connecting to the deep link between their faith and their health. At the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Eastover, just outside of Fayetteville, Monday evenings [...]
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Welcome to the Family
Who’s your doctor? That’s a simple enough question; but one with no answer for a growing number of North Carolinians. Like the rest of the country, North Carolina doesn’t have enough primary care physicians to meet the needs of its people. So, what’s the problem? Family medicine is hard work. The hours are long. The [...]
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Planting Seeds for a Healthy Tomorrow
Making a connection between where food is grown and the people who grow it gives school children a new way of thinking when it comes to making healthy food choices. To make that connection a part of a child’s everyday experience, Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP) decided to take an “upstream” approach – integrating local [...]
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Community of Care
Carol Lamb has traveled full circle with the Charlotte Community Health Clinic, one of 79 member clinics of the North Carolina Association of Free Clinics (NCAFC) – all with the mission of providing health care to the uninsured. When she first came to the clinic, Lamb was unemployed, uninsured and sick. She found care and [...]
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Parents. Teachers. Progress.
Josyln Allen, principal at Morven Elementary School in Anson County, makes it easy to understand when she explains that parents, teachers and school leaders work together to take care of the children, because “… they are our children.” During the 2009-2010 school year, 76 percent of Anson County students received free or reduced-price lunches. That statistic [...]
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