CALLAWAY COUNTY – Missouri’s Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program hosted a resource event Friday at the Callaway County Health Department for families and pregnant women.
WIC is a state nutrition program. WIC breastfeeding peer counselor Michelle Love says the program reaches beyond people of those identities.
“It’s not just for women anymore,” Love said. “It can be for dads, it can be for grandparents, it can be for foster parents. It’s not just women and infants and children anymore.”
The fair was also sponsored by Healthy Blue, which is part of Missouri Medicaid. Healthy Blue provided $300 for WIC to purchase diapers, strollers and other infant needs to give away to families.
“They [Healthy Blue] provided funds for us to buy things like door prizes, or anything else that we might need to give out to the community,” Love said. “Just another awesome resource. Healthy Blue also provided bags with their own information and little goodies in there as well.”
Friday’s event featured different giveaways, as well as eight different vendors so people could gather information and resources.
The vendors included WIC, Parents as Teachers, Pregnancy Help Center of Central Missouri, Fulton Fire Department, Central Missouri Community Action, First Chance for Children, Serve Incorporated of Callaway County and Community Health Center of Central Missouri.
Love says many people don’t realize the number of resources and organizations available to help them.
“A lot of our clients that come in here, they don’t know about the awesome resources that they’re they have available to them,” Love said. “So we have put a fair together today to bring all of those resources not even all of them, but most of them together here at the health department.”
Coletta Williams works for Faith Maternity Care, a nonprofit in Fulton. She brought some women with her Friday to check out the event that she said she’s been looking forward to all week.
“I told the girls we need to get ready. We need to go. We need to be on time, which was running a little late,” Williams said. “But yes, we have really been looking forward to this, to all the free things and for them to learn how to get back out into the community and make it in the community. That is our biggest goal.”
WIC coordinator Tina Morrifsey said they are hoping to do another event like this in the fall.
“This is our first time doing an event like this. So hopefully we get really good feedback from this event,” Morrifsey said. “And provided that we do, we would love to do this, just on a bigger scale even with more vendors coming out, more resources coming out, more things to offer to the community.”
For more information and to stay updated on WIC events, visit its website.