Playing with your food is highly encouraged during Brookside Community Health Center’s “Taste the Rainbow” event, organized by the center’s Growing Healthy with Equity program in March.

For some families, isolating indoors for so long during the COVID-19 pandemic had lasting effects, including decreased physical activity, unwanted weight gain and related health problems. It was a trend that Brookside Community Health Center pediatrician Natalia Jaimes, MD, MSc, observed in nearly half of her young patients in early 2021.

To support the patient population she and her colleagues care for at Brookside — mostly Spanish-speaking families experiencing various socioeconomic barriers — the team came together to develop a stigma-free and culturally sensitive fitness and nutrition program for families. Launched in 2022, Growing Healthy with Equity is a multipronged, multidisciplinary program that seeks to address excessive weight, promote healthy habits and improve mental health among children and teens using trauma-informed strategies.

“We are trying to address not just the medical points but also the social determinants of health and family situations that accompany obesity because it’s not just one person’s problem,” Jaimes said. “It is a systemic issue, and we want to address it as such.”

Families in historically disadvantaged communities face many barriers to good health. Chief among them are food insecurity, time, money and transportation.

“Many of our families have a single parent, and when both parents are present, they both have to work,” Jaimes said. “With what time are they going to bring their kids to any physical activity? With what money are they going to pay for classes or afterschool programs?”

Growing Healthy with Equity was designed to acknowledge and address these challenges in different ways. Knowing that it is not realistic for many working families to attend multiple appointments with different specialists, the program provides stacked consultations so that families can meet with a pediatrician, dietitian and fitness coordinator all in one visit to the clinic.

The program is among the many ways Mass General Brigham organizations are working to address systemic racism as a public health issue in support of United Against Racism, Mass General Brigham’s diversity, equity and inclusion strategy to address the impact of racism on patients, staff and communities.

Registered dietitian Jaclyn Lerner, RD, a community nutritionist at Brookside, explained some of the challenges that families experience around food insecurity. For instance, parents of picky eaters know all too well that when an unfamiliar food is placed on their child’s plate, it will often wind up in the trash.

“Getting more nutrient-dense foods can often be more expensive, and a lot of our families don’t have the budget to explore new fruits and vegetables that they worry will go to waste,” she said.

Lerner noted that while food pantries can help fill that gap, most have limited hours — usually during the workday — and families are unable to utilize them. Additionally, not every family qualifies for food assistance programs. The Brookside team recently partnered with the YMCA of Greater Boston’s Mobile Market, a van that provides free produce and shelf-stable items to community residents. It now stops twice a month at Brookside, right before Growing Healthy with Equity holds its weekly clinic.

“We will screen for food insecurity, make referrals and then are also working on some food security initiatives that can be tied into the program and for the community at large to help have more access,” Lerner said.

‘Just the beginning’

The Growing Healthy with Equity team has even made changes to the language they use with patients about weight gain, emphasizing the use of phrases such as “growing healthy” and reducing the use of terms such as “obesity.”

A highlight of the initiative is its free programming, which incorporates physical activity, nutrition and mental health. From dance classes to teen yoga, the team is constantly looking for ways to make staying healthy fun for kids.

“Recently Jaclyn and I put on a kids’ food-tasting class where we brought in all colors of the rainbow —through fruits and vegetables — and the kids were able to cut them with kid-safe knives and make basic recipes,” said Alaina Duchin, case manager for Fitness in the City at Brookside. “We got feedback from the parents that it was nice to have that opportunity where they didn’t have to go out and buy these things themselves because it is a big barrier to our patients who are low income.”

Through her role, Duchin also helps identify resources for families to attend free physical activity programs at other local organizations, such as the YMCA.

In the two years since the initiative’s launch, Growing Healthy with Equity is starting to have a measurable effect. In October 2021, 48 percent of Brookside pediatric patients were classified as overweight, a rate that has since dropped to 44.6 percent as of February 2024. Children with severe obesity went from 10.5 percent in October 2021 to 7.7 percent in February 2024.

Energized by their progress thus far, the interprofessional team hopes to continue building on their momentum.

“I feel like this is just the beginning of something that needs to be a lot bigger,” Jaimes said. “We are trying to address as much as we can with the resources we have and respond to a bigger issue that is not so easy to address, but little by little we are making progress.”