Growing healthier neighborhoods through public-private partnerships

To grasp the urgency of the nutrition crisis facing our city, you only need to look at the numbers. More than half of all adults in our city are overweight or obese. One in five kindergarten students are obese. And in some high-poverty neighborhoods, only one in ten residents eat the daily-recommended amount of fruits and vegetables – which is half the rate of our highest-income neighborhoods. 

But it was a different set of numbers that convinced Unilever to commit $4.1 million to New York City’s Building Healthy Communities initiative, which is the largest corporate commitment in City history. Last March, a team representing Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Office of Strategic Partnerships and the Fund for Public Health in New York took a group of Unilever senior executives on a tour of East Harlem. We knew that sustainability is integral to how Unilever does business, so we were interested to hear their thoughts on how we might work together with community residents to build urban gardens.

As the Unilever execs walked around the grounds of a New York City Housing Authority development and spotted a number of spaces that would be perfect for an urban farm, they started to crunch the numbers. Based on their professional experience, they were able to estimate how many pounds of vegetables and how many meals a sizable garden would be able to produce. And the numbers were big – we’re talking thousands of tons of food and more than a hundred thousand healthy meals.

Unilever saw what we saw – the potential to move farm-to-table dining out of the foodie world and into the real world, where it belongs. And in Building Healthy Communities, they saw an opportunity to partner with government to realize shared goals and make real change. New York City is already home to a large and innovative farm on one public housing development in Red Hook, Brooklyn. This farm is truly rooted in the neighborhood it serves. Most of the farmers live in nearby developments and work with the housing community to help make all of the planting and harvesting decisions. In neighborhoods where supermarkets are sometimes a bus ride away, this garden is a nutritional oasis.  

With Unilever’s help, the city will work with the New York City Housing Authority to create another urban farm in East Harlem. Unilever will also join forces with an existing program that trains aspiring chefs to lead cooking classes at a NYCHA Community Center. 

And Unilever’s generosity will ripple far beyond this single initiative. Building Healthy Communities supports another effort I am leading – ThriveNYC, our effort to create a truly effective mental health system. When people eat better, they feel better – not just physically, but also mentally. On paper, that may seem a little abstract. But in real life, I assure you that people who work on these farms and eat vegetables they have grown with their own hands will experience a sense of satisfaction that food alone cannot provide, no matter how delicious. 

Public-private partnerships like this are at the heart of the work we do at the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, which is supporting Building Healthy Communities. As the city’s official non-profit, the Mayor’s Fund is working with the business and philanthropic communities to create more initiatives that take advantage of the great reach government has and the flexibility of the private sector. 

Building Healthy Communities is a wonderful example of just how much we can accomplish when we work as a team. When corporations and foundations partner with government, the whole of their generosity exceeds the sum of its parts. In order to solve problems like obesity, we need every sector of society to combine forces and apply our strengths in a coordinated way. Together, we can strengthen the roots of our community, both literarily and figuratively, and grow a healthier, happier New York City.  

Chirlane McCray is the First Lady of New York City and Chair of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City.