The Cherokee County Healthy Living Program is helping communities throughout the area live healthier lives.
The program is funded through the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust, a community-based grant that seeks to prevent and reduce tobacco use and obesity.
Lora Buechele, program coordinator of TSET Healthy Living Program, is working on her third grant over a seven-year period.
“The Healthy Living Program is set up to work with the community on increasing access to healthy food, increasing opportunities for physical activity, and decreasing tobacco use and exposure to secondhand smoke, especially among our youth,” said Buechele.
TSET completed an extensive needs assessment last year, and Buechele is in charge of looking over its results and developing strategies to benefit the community.
“That was our biggest accomplishment. It allowed us to see the needs of the community, and how we can truly help the community. Through that, we were able to see indirect issues that our community deals with. It comes full circle, because a lot of the things we heard about from the community are mental behavioral health issues, and high populations of individuals that experience homelessness,” she said.
While the Healthy Living Program doesn’t directly work with issues pertaining to mental health and homelessness, it partners with other organizations to tackle these issues. These two issues are connected to the Healthy Living Program’s goals of curbing tobacco use and encouraging physical activity.
“If we can’t provide basic needs, then we won’t provide the resources to be healthier people. A lot of times if you are struggling with mental health, or substance use disorder, you aren’t thinking about how you eat or if you are getting inadequate physical activity. You are struggling just to get through, day-by-day. It’s important that we have these partnerships when we are looking at healthy living,” she said.
TSET Healthy Living Program has hosted the Bike and Walk to Schools programs through Tahlequah and Hulbert Public Schools. It also hosted Open Streets Tahlequah, which promoted non-motorized activity, such as walking, biking, and skateboarding in Downtown Tahlequah.
In August, TSET Healthy Living Program hosted a Back-to-School Bash at Norris Park where parents were taught how to find safe routes for their students to walk or bike to school. At the end of the 2021-2022 school year, the program will host an end of the year resource event, due to the popularity of the Back-to-School Bash.
The Healthy Food Retail Task Force has come from the TSET Healthy Living Program, which was formed with the City of Tahlequah through a food retail resolution.
“Through that we are really focusing on access to healthy foods through a couple of different methods,” said Buechele.
This spring, the partnership has announced that it will launch a mobile farmers’ market, in collaboration with the Tahlequah Farmers’ Market. The purpose of the initiative is to bring healthy food to parts of the community that would not otherwise have access to the Tahlequah Farmers’ Market.
For more information, visit the Cherokee County TSET Healthy Living Program Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/CherokeeCountyHealthyLivingProgram/.