Welcome to “Paying it Forward,” a monthly interview series made possible by Piedmont Health. In this series, we hear from the folks at Piedmont about the importance of community health centers – and why they chose a career in community health.
This month, Aaron welcomes Jared Mathewson, the new assistant manager of the WIC program at Piedmont’s Siler City Community Health Center.
“WIC is the supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children,” Mathewson says. “So we’re (working with) pregnant women, postpartum women (for) up to a year, and then their infants and kids and their families.”
Mathewson didn’t start out in community health, or even the health care field at all. But after graduating from NC State, he spent two years working for AmeriCorps and developed a love for service work – a love he says he can fulfill on a regular basis at Piedmont.
“There are success stories every day,” he says. “Honestly, every day is very rewarding.”
Specifically, Mathewson says many of his biggest successes come from helping families make better nutrition choices. That’s partly a matter of educating people about healthy eating, but it’s also about making sure his patients have access to healthy food in the first place.
“All of us struggle with healthy food all of the time,” he says. “Even if you have an abundance of money to get all of the food that you want, we still struggle to understand what is healthy food, where to get healthy food, how to prepare healthy food. Not only is WIC providing the ability to buy healthy food, we’re also providing guidance on what is healthy food, (and) how to prepare healthy food for you and your kids…
“(And) some of these families, their kids have feeding difficulties,” he continues. “If you (haven’t) been through having a child with feeding difficulties, it can be hard to understand the scope of what some of those families deal with. Some of them physically can’t swallow, and some on the autism spectrum have a lot of difficulty with food textures. A lot of times, nutritional shakes can be safe foods for those kids, but I certainly can’t afford to be putting two or three of those bottles in a kid every single day of the week. So one of the great things that WIC can do is get a prescription from a doctor and provide that free of charge. So when I think about big successes, I think about those families… I don’t know if that kid would be able to eat, (or) if that family could afford to feed those nutritional products to their kids without those benefits.”
97.9 The Hill WCHL and Chapelboro.com are your headquarters for local news and local voices in Chapel Hill-Carrboro. Every weekday morning, 97.9 The Hill’s Aaron Keck chats with government officials, UNC scholars, business and nonprofit leaders, area musicians, and others in our community as they share their thoughts, their experience, and their expertise on the central issues of today. Click here to listen back to all of Aaron’s conversations – and tune in to “This Morning with Aaron Keck” at 7:30 a.m. on 97.9 The Hill to hear those conversations live.
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