By: Kelsey Aylor, Senior Writer

For a group of students at Wofford, the oft-said childhood phrase “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” has grown from being sound advice to an effective philosophy that guides and grounds their organization.

Nutrition Now, a nutrition education program that serves first grade students at an afterschool program in the Arcadia area, began as an idea formulated after seeing the need for a health initiative.

“Sometimes these kids would eat a Pop-tart with cookies for dinner because the ARCH program did not have enough funding to provide healthy meals,” says Annie McDermott ’17, who now serves as the director of the program.

Beginning as a one-month flagship program and now expanding to serve four meals a week during the entirety of Wofford’s academic year, the program has experienced immense growth. They were even featured in the Spartanburg Herald Journal last month in an article meant to increase exposure.

“At the core, we are a community service program so [the article] was a great resource for us,” says McDermott. “It’s all about maintaining strong ties to the community that we’re in and finding ways to promote awareness and involvement.”

Since the article’s original run, individuals and organizations have contacted the leaders at ARCH commenting on the value they see in the nutritional initiative. Nutrition Now already was working with Hub City Co-op, local churches and other organizations, but hopes to expand their network to “put down stronger roots.”

“We listened to the community to diagnose a need, rather than decide on an arbitrary project without knowledge of what is important to that community,” says McDermott. “Health education is often neglected, so it has been extremely exciting and empowering to recognize this need, develop a solution with a team of leaders and use my sills and resources to address the issue.”

For the remainder of the semester, McDermott plans to work with the other team members to grow the program in a more sustainable way. They hope to use community feedback to implement more effective programming for the first graders and their families.

“On all sides, people tend to gravitate towards apathy, so it can be hard to get people excited about what we’re doing,” she says. “But when a six-year-old asks you what vegetable you have cooked for them because it’s yummy and they’d never had it before, it’s all worth it…because one day it may lead to long-term habits and healthy lifestyle changes.”