QUITO NUTRITIONAL PROJECT
TARGET US$950.00. 2/26 UPDATE: $250 CONTRIBUTED.

The Quito Project is a student organization at the University of Michigan. The group is composed of a diverse group of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, young professionals, and University faculty who are committed to promoting health and well-being in Ecuador. We work in partnership with La Fundación San Martín, a small private foundation in Quito to develop and implement sustainable intervention programs in the San Martin/San Blas area of Quito. For four months each summer we travel to Quito to implement a variety of health, education, and social programs and to utilize existing community resources in making these programs both relevant and sustainable.

In the summer of 2006, the students began a series of weekly nutrition classes for the men and women of San Martin/San Blas. The aim of the classes is to provide nutrition education and offer strategies for cooking nutritious meals on a limited budget. Each week, approximately 20 community members attend a two-hour class, which is facilitated by Adriana Oña, the director of La Fundación San Martín. Each class consists of a brief instruction period, where a lesson is presented on that week’s nutrition topic. Classes are highly interactive; participants are encouraged to share their knowledge with each other, to ask questions, and to offer ideas as to how the lesson can be applied to improve their own nutritional intake and that of their families. The second half of each class is devoted to cooking; each week the participants learn a new, healthy, affordable recipe and cook it together. Our classes provide a forum for participants to gain new knowledge of nutrition and to share what they already know with their classmates. Through their participation, community members also gain a support network of their classmates, an additional valuable resource that helps to facilitate our goal of improving the well-being of all community members.

The Quito Project would like to begin a year of weekly classes on health and nutrition attended by adult members of the San Martin/San Blas community in the south of Quito. The requested level of support is $950.