Meet our new Team Member, Yarelia!

Yarelia graduated with her Bachelors in Community Health from the University of South Carolina Upstate. She enjoys traveling, reading, and being outdoors with her dog Kaiser.

LiveWell Greenville is thrilled to welcome Yarelia Fuentes to the LiveWell Team as the Pediatric Food and Housing Security Navigator. This is a joint position with Prisma Health aimed at helping families of pediatric patients connect with local services and supports that address food and housing insecurity. The development of this new position bloomed out of the statewide Health Begins Learning Collaborative, funded by the Duke Endowment and Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of SC,  which pairs four community-based organizations and health care systems to identify new ways of addressing food security in SC. The Jolley Foundation is supporting a three-year pilot of the Pediatric Navigator Project.

As part of the learning collaborative, the Greenville Team took a deep dive into some of the gaps in the system designed to assist families and community members access food when experiencing periodic and chronic food and housing insecurity (defined as intermittent gaps in access to nutritious foods and safe, affordable housing). Prisma noted that while they were asking the questions related to housing and food insecurity, a closed-loop referral process would be much more successful in helping families connect to needed supports. A closed-loop referral means that in addition to sharing information about community resources, navigators continue to work with clients one on one to ensure that they are able to connect with agencies and that barriers to access are addressed together when necessary.    

With the support of Furman University’s Institute for the Advancement of Community Health, LiveWell Greenville and Prisma will be monitoring the success of this pilot project and reporting results as they become available.