Melanie's Corner

Nutrition team after unpacking MiPlato and other Spanish products from LZX

LZX Project Manager, Linnea Duffus and I recently traveled to Chile to visit EPES. EPES is an acronym for Educacion Popular en Salud which can be translated into Popular Education for Health. It is a program that focuses on empowering shantytown women to make changes in domestic violence, tobacco control, breast cancer, HIV awareness, and more recently, nutrition education.

A good friend of mine from Owatonna, Karen Anderson, founded this program 29 years ago and is the driving force behind its success. Her passion and resilience are unmatched, and her ability to address the root of the problem and work from the bottom up is what makes EPES unlike any other organization. A great example I can share is when families in the shantytowns were experiencing a high volume of rat bites in their homes. Karen and her team didn’t just treat the rat bites. They found out exactly whythe rats were present and eliminated them all together. This is the business model for EPES: Get to the root of the problem and take action from there.

Myself and Linnea in front of a MyPlate (MiPlato) mural in Chile.

Another example is the work they completed leading up to our trip to Chile in November. The program spent 6 months evaluating eating habits in a shantytown of Santiago, Chile. The long term plan is to develop a training model for people in the community to be nutrition promoters. LZX was able to donate and bring a number of items in our Spanish product line to be used to train these nutrition promoters in Santiago.

I have never seen a program moresuccessful. EPES training impacts future generations. EPES recruits, trains, and teaches poor women to be leaders. I have had the honor of being part of this incredible organization for 15 years now, and I am thrilled to announce that EPES is now our official South American distributor for Spanish LZX materials.

Chilean First Lady, Cecilia Morel, admires our poster of her U.S. counterpart, Michelle Obama

As Karen put it, “In poor communities, women are shakers and movers. They take care of everyone. Over the past 30 years hundreds of women have been empowered to find their leadership skills thanks to EPES encouragement, training and challenge. These women have role modeled for their daughters and granddaughters a new generation of leaders for advocacy for the marginalized and poor.”

What an incredible vision and mission! We are so thrilled to support EPES as it continues to change the lives of Chilean women. We take away so many great memories and empowering stories from our trip this year. We forged bonds that will help us communicate, collaborate, and go forward. Our discussions for fundraising and exciting ideas for celebrating EPES’ 30th anniversary next year have us energized for 2012.

In March of next year, there will be eventful concerts here in the U.S., and in November of 2012, we will celebrate with a week-long event in Chile. Come join us!