BATON ROUGE, La (BRPROUD) — Helping with food insecurity, the Healthy Blue, Louisiana’s affiliated foundation, has given a grant to the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank.
Healthy Blue donated $450,000 to the food bank to help with their ‘food is medicine’ program, a program that gives boxes of free food to hospitals, clinics and health facilities in the greater Baton Rouge area.
Doctor Tonya Jagneaux, of Our Lady of The Lake, confirms this is an issue that she has been seeing.
“There are a number of situations where I saw young people repetitively come in with conditions that were related to food insecurity and others that caused their death,” Jagneaux said.
Mike Manning, CEO of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, is excited for the funding and says the program has been life changing.
“People in a medical situation need so much more assistance and if we can help them with food to bridge them until they can get further food assistance, that’s the focus. To make sure it’s worried about their health and make sure their recovery is successful,” Manning said.
Now with this specific grant, he hopes to extend the assistance to a specific audience.
“Specialized diets for people with hypertension and people with diabetes. People coming out of heart situations so that we make sure the diet is right for whatever medical condition they’re dealing with,” said Manning.
