Greenville, South Carolina | BUILD 3.0 | 2019-2022
“We were able to put pieces together and figure out — it’s not just that a child is obese and they need to eat less and move more. It’s about the community and the system they’re living in and how that is hurting or enhancing their health.”
— Sabrina Smith, LiveWell Greenville
Our health isn’t just determined by what we eat and how often we exercise — health is shaped by many factors, like where we live, the quality of care available to us, and the foods we can access in our neighborhoods. Through an award from The BUILD Health Challenge® (BUILD) in its 3.0 cohort, local organizations and residents in Greenville, South Carolina developed new ways of working together, leading to stronger relationships and improved resources for community health.
Understanding Elevated Rates of Chronic Disease
Outside of Greenville’s city center is the White Horse Road Corridor, a 12-mile stretch of highway where many of Greenville’s Hispanic and Black residents live. For many, the Hispanic groceries, markets, and clubs are comforting reminders of home.
But the White Horse Road Corridor experiences pervasive racial segregation, and the significant lack of resources has contributed to elevated rates of chronic disease in the area, including obesity, especially among Hispanic male youth. This became apparent to the LiveWell Greenville team during a research project they led in 2019 in partnership with Furman University.
Seeking to better understand the root causes, LiveWell Greenville and its partners launched the Build Trust, Build Health project with support from a BUILD award.
“Greenville has a lot of different assets when it comes to community organizations. We were excited to bring all of those partners together. We decided that as a community we wanted to apply for the BUILD award because the values of BUILD were the values of our coalition.”
— Sabrina Smith, LiveWell Greenville
A Path to Building Trust
To guide their work, the teams at LiveWell Greenville and the Hispanic Alliance convened community focus groups and created the Healthy Equity Action Leaders (HEAL) board, a group of White Horse Road Corridor neighbors who have experienced food insecurity, limited active living access, and feelings of mistrust or not belonging due to discrimination. The focus groups were a critical opportunity for the neighbors to begin advocating for change.
The focus groups also helped community leaders understand that residents were not able to get the care and resources they needed because language services were not widely available, contributing not only to poorer health outcomes like increased obesity, but also fueling mistrust. They heard stories, Vanessa notes, about parents who were unable to talk to the teacher because they didn’t have a shared language to communicate, or situations where children had to provide interpretation for their parents’ medical services.
New Ways of Working — For Greater Impact
Based on what they learned through the community-informed research and planning conversations with the HEAL Board, community leaders were able to identify and begin making needed changes.
“Before the BUILD award, LiveWell did more sector-based work,” said Sabrina. “Through systems mapping, we changed the way that we worked. Instead of just working on policy, systems, and environmental changes at a specific location, we began to work on larger systems changes at the community level.”
The Build Trust, Build Health work continues to grow and community residents are benefitting from its impact. For example, the project has trained more than 250 health providers in language justice and culturally inclusive practices to further strengthen trust with their patients. And through Canasta Básica, a program that provides Greenville’s families with culturally appropriate healthy foods, more than 1,600 families have been served so far, with $157,000 invested in the program.
“At the end, we are people and people have the same needs. We want to have food, we want to have a roof, we want to have connections. That’s what this project is creating. Because I got here after a hurricane with nothing, I value this because I know it will create a whole new life for people, for our community.”
— Vanessa Rodriguez, Hispanic Alliance / LiveWell Greenville
In March 2025, LiveWell Greenville and the Institute for the Advancement of Community Health at Furman University were awarded a $5,000,000 grant, called the Health Equity Research Network on Community-Driven Research Approaches, from the American Heart Association and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to advance their community health research.
As Greenville looks to the future, the collaboration has made the Health Equity Action Leaders board a permanent fixture in LiveWell’s structure, thereby ensuring that efforts to promote food security, active living, and health equity continue to be grounded in community members’ life experiences.
This update on the BUILD partnership in Greenville, SC is part of an unfolding series in honor of BUILD’s tenth anniversary. Learn more about their earlier work here.
Explore more learnings, stories, and impact from ten years of building together.
