Hello and welcome to living in the Lehigh Valley, where our focus is your health and wellness.

I'm your host, Brittany Sweeney.

A program dedicated to helping people make healthier food choices is working to expand its reach.

The Kellyn Foundation is already bringing nutritious meals to those who live in the Lehigh Valley.

Now it's teaming up with other organizations to find ways to get more local farms involved.

Hi.

Picking up for Bahler.

Hey.

Awesome.

This is yours.

Thank you.

Having fruits, veggies and prepared healthy meals available where she works helps mom of two Kristin Bahler add time to her day.

I guess this will be my lunch today.

Kellyn has really helped me incorporate that more whole food plant based nutritional diet back into my busy lifestyle.

Being a mom with kids and a husband.

And so it's just made it easier for me.

Yum.

I’m in.

The price point is often so competitive and it's easy for me to just order it on a Sunday and pick it up on a Tuesday or Wednesday at a hospital location.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

Oh, I can weight lift with this one.

Bahler is the director of health promotion and wellness for Lehigh Valley Health Network and has been instrumental in implementing programs throughout the network to help staff have access to healthier foods like this mobile market at LVHN’s Hecktown-Oaks Campus in lower Nazareth Township.

The Kellyn Mobile Market could provide the ready to eat meals.

They can eat it for lunch, or they could take it home to their family.

But then also the produce.

So get fresh fruits and vegetables and grains.

Shop at the market here at the hospital campus and skip a step to going to the grocery store.

We have two 27 foot refrigerated trailers and we go across the valley.

It's a rolling produce department is what it is.

Along with lifestyle, medicine, meals.

I’ll see you next week.

Have a nice weekend.

Bringing local produce and nutritious meals to where people live and work is the mission of the Kellyn Foundation, a nonprofit in the Lehigh Valley.

Eric Ruth is the co-founder and CEO.

And whether it be a senior home, whether it be a community school neighborhood, whether it be an employer, immerse them in all the opportunities to lead a healthy lifestyle.

The mobile farmer's market stops at quite a few locations throughout the valley, including here at the Greenway in South Bethlehem, serving roughly 2500 families.

But the food access component is just one initiative Kellyn implements.

We have a strategy we call the Healthy Neighborhood Immersion Strategy, which includes teaching our children in the schools, which include school gardens.

We also have our lifestyle medicine program, which takes families, grandparents, parents and children and helps walk them through the whole challenge of getting away from our standard American diet to a healthy lifestyle.

We have Kellyn Kitchens, which provides healthy whole food plant based meals.

Now, Ruth says the foundation is looking at an even broader approach.

Kellyn is teaming up with the Bethlehem Area School District, LVHN, Bethlehem Food Co-op, Second Harvest Food Pantry, Penn State Extension, Rodale Institute, and Meals on Wheels as buyers to help local farmers build supply and demand.

And that just simply means we come out and we say, You want to grow an extra 50,000 pounds of sweet potatoes, I’ll buy them from you at this price for next year.

Just put them in the ground The goal is to develop a food infrastructure that can provide locally grown and produced food to the people who live in the Lehigh Valley by maximizing farmers revenues and helping them to grow their farm at the least amount of risk to them.

Ruth says the initiative is underway and the next step is to meet with farmers in coming weeks to get them on board.

He expects that program aimed at bringing a more balanced food system to the area to be up and running by the spring.

It's the social norm is changing and I think you can feel it across the valley and across the country that this is finally being accepted and understood.

We need as a as a whole valley to work together.

It cannot be Kellyn alone.

It cannot be Lehigh Valley Health Network alone.

It has to be all of us working together to make the social norms a healthy environment.

Those looking to pick up groceries from the Kellyn Foundation's mobile farmers market can order online.

Kellyn also packs extra items for folks who stop by to shop without ordering ahead.

Days and locations for the mobile markets can be found on the Kellyn Foundation website.

The nonprofit also offers affordable pricing options to lower income families with the help of corporate sponsors and state grants.

That will do it for this edition of Living in the Lehigh Valley.

I'm Brittany Sweeney, hoping you stay happy and healthy.