A Prescription for Nutrition: Veggie Rx Sees Growth

Fewer things are more important than nutrition, health, and community. Even better is bringing all those together. That’s the root of the Veggie Rx program at University of Minnesota Physicians Broadway Family Medicine Clinic, a bountiful initiative begun by Community Health Worker LaTrese VanBuren-Thompson in 2024. Over the past year, it has only grown and given rise to a larger program that includes cooking classes for clinic patients and community members.

Veggie Rx, as it is affectionately known, started out as a seed of an idea to provide nutritious vegetables to clinic patients. M Physicians Broadway Family Medicine Clinic’s doctors wrote a “prescription” for fresh vegetables for patients who they believed might benefit from it, including those who were dealing with food insecurity, obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes. Their treatment plan included salad greens, peppers, and other foods that came straight out of two North Minneapolis community gardens.

It has been a group effort, with VanBuren serving as the team captain. She particularly appreciates receiving substantial help from Sharmyn Phipps, Health and Nutrition African American Community Coordinator at the Robert R. Jones Urban Research and Outreach Center, University of Minnesota Extension.

“We partnered with Sharmyn Phipps and Urban Agriculture initiative,” explains VanBuren. “Hennepin County gifted the university two lots of land, which were meant for community gardens. So we partnered in opening the gardens last year, and I tended the gardens by tabling and offering blood pressure checks and resources.”

The gardens and associated health checks helped meet a need among the clinic’s patients; it wasn’t yet an official program. As time went on, VanBuren started brainstorming ways to expand and do even more good with the community gardens. When she received notice of a grant application from Hennepin County, she jumped on the opportunity.

“I applied for the grant,” she says. “I only applied for $10,000 because I figured I just needed to get the vegetables. The county actually reached back out and said, ‘We want to give you a grant for $50,000. We really think you can do great things with this money.’”

Freshly energized with the good news, VanBuren started working on a plan. She thought about partnering with local farmers and food vendors in order to offer more to the community. Those partnerships led to the official start of Veggie Rx.

“It was open to our patients and the community,” she recalls. “Every other Thursday, I set up my tent in the front of the clinic, I would play music, give out swag, offer blood pressure checks, and I would just hand out produce to anybody who wanted to sign up for the program.”

As part of their work in the Broadway clinic, residents in the North Memorial Family Medicine Residency Program helped out at the tent by providing education, blood sugar checks, and blood pressure checks to the patients. Many of the patients began scheduling their medical check ups on the same day as their produce pick up. In addition, word began to circulate about the Veggie Rx program, inspiring others to not only seek out fresh vegetables but medical check ups too.

VanBuren shares: “A community member would be walking down the street, asking ‘What are you doing?’, and when we would tell them about it, they might say, ‘Oh, I haven't seen a doctor.’ And so that was the opportunity to tell them about our clinics, primary care, and why it's so important.”

In the grant, VanBuren had stated a goal of serving 20 to 30 Black and Indigenous people per week through the Veggie Rx program. That number grew to about 46 people per week, and at one point she recalls seeing 104 people in a row come up to her tent.

Despite the fast growth, there was room to do even more with the available grant money. So VanBuren partnered with the UMN Extension’s Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) program and a local cook to create a healthy cooking class for community members.

“We offered a weekly 12-week cohort of cooking classes where we taught the participants how to prepare the vegetables and the produce in a more heart-healthy way,” she explains.

Cooking class participants learn how to make vegetarian and low-sodium meals using many of the foods they pick from the community gardens. Recipes come from the African American Heritage Cookbook. Participants often share success stories of how they recreated recipes in their homes.

Interest in the Veggie Rx program and the cooking class continues to grow. VanBuren says that she has received notice that Hennepin County has awarded the program another grant for 2025—this time for $60,000. The plan is to incorporate some form of healthy movement activity into the existing framework, which could mean offering yoga or Zumba classes to community members and clinic patients.

“When I first decided to do Veggie RX,” VanBuren shares, “I wondered, ‘Is this enough? Is this what our community could benefit from?’ But then seeing the numbers of participants, seeing people making it to their doctor's appointments, getting their blood pressure checked, actually coming to the cooking class and showing us that they tried the recipes at home . . . It made me realize that I did a good thing for our community.”