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LYNDA RESNICK ON GROWING CENTRAL CALIFORNIA’S
AGRICULTURE—AND ITS COMMUNITIES.
RESNICK: Five years ago, I had an epiphany here at the Aspen
Institute. I realized that instead of investing in other people’s visions
of charity, I really had to start doing the work myself. I had to get
in the field, and I had to get my hands dirty. The Central Valley of
California is where our crops grow, and that is where I saw the most
need and where we should go.
Let me introduce you to the Wonderful Company. Our
products are real food—unprocessed, natural, and nutritious.
Being wonderful goes beyond consumer promise; it also extends
to our philanthropic activities. Our main focus is investing in the
communities where our employees live and work, and that is the
Central Valley—45,000 square miles with 6.5 million people.
It is the heart of California. It is where 50 percent of the fruits,
vegetables, and nuts that we in America consume everyday are
grown. It also is the home of the majority of the Wonderful
workforce.
We’ve placed a great deal of importance on establishing
extensive community-development outreach programs and
educational initiatives across the region. We are trying in our way
to transform the cycle of poverty and neglect that has plagued this
region for decades. After visiting several small towns in the region,
we picked the little hamlet of Lost Hills to start our community-
development work. The Wonderful Pistachio plant is 13 miles
from this little community, but otherwise it was lost—forgotten by
county, state, and federal government. The community park was
dilapidated and unsafe. They didn’t have streetlights or any basic
infrastructure. And the children had nowhere to go after school to
play.
In business, before we go to market, we do market research to
understand if our product or service is relevant to our consumers.
I believe that philanthropy is no different. I didn’t know any other
way to start, except to build our work on the wants and needs of
the people we were serving. So we started with focus groups. And
then to verify our findings, we went door to door to every single
house—except for the two meth labs in Lost Hills.
The community’s first request was to put lights on the basketball
In July 2015, more than 350 entrepreneurial leaders from 37
countries—including Aspen Global Leadership Network Fellows
and trailblazers from other Institute programs—gathered for the
third-annual Aspen Action Forum. The theme of this year’s forum,
collaborative leadership, was exemplified by Institute Executive
Board Member Lynda Resnick’s keynote address. Resnick,
vice-chair and co-owner of the Wonderful Company, discussed
her high-impact community-development work in California’s
Central Valley.
BEYOND
WONDERFUL
CourtesyofLyndaResnick
Resnick

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court because the kids would back up their cars and turn the lights
on so they could play basketball at night, but we didn’t stop there.
Today, the Wonderful park has two community centers, two soccer
fields, volleyball courts, and everything a playground needs to make
kids happy and engaged. We offer English-as-a-second-language
classes, summer camps, afterschool activities, zumba, martial arts,
computer science, ballet, voter registration, and so forth. The scope
of our improvement projects reaches well beyond the park. We also
paved the roads, put in sidewalks, bus shelters, streetlights, storm
drains, and planted drought-resistant landscaping. All working side
by side with the citizens of Lost Hills.
In a joint project with the USDA, we helped build 82 affordable
single-family three-bedroom homes and apartments. The rent
starts from $350 a month to $700 depending on how much the
agricultural worker makes. These will be ready for occupancy in
February of next year. And we helped finance and build Gabby’s,
the town’s first restaurant. (It is the best taco you’ve ever had in
your life.)
Along the way, we reduced crime 50 to 60 percent. We helped
return annualized benefits of $200,000 to $500,000 in county taxes
back to the community. They never got a dime of the taxes that
were paid, and now they do. But most important, we’ve helped
establish a community advisory group: local residents who are
learning empowerment so that they can run their town, and they
will very soon. It will become an incorporated town.
But without education all our good work might not be
sustainable. Through the Wonderful program, we’ve reached
55,000 students at 58 schools in 18 districts, and we already
awarded 1,500 college scholarships and incentives as well as 1,300
teacher grants. We also operate two preschools with two more in
the way. We put art education in 11 schools. We have 26 summer
camps in a place that never had summer camps before. We also
have our own Wonderful College Prep Academy founded in 2009.
But what I’m most proud of is our Wonderful Agricultural
Career Prep. This is a program that prepares students for careers
in the new Ag, which is highly technical and STEM-oriented, by
creating a collaboration between regional community colleges,
high schools, and our company as the industry partner. During an
innovative, rigorous four-year academic track, each student and
their fellow cohorts do more than meet high school graduation
requirements. They take college courses given by college professors,
earning them college credit. So when they graduate from high
school, they have an AA degree in agriculture, and they can either
go to a four-year school and enter as a junior or they can enter
our skilled Ag workforce and get an entry-level job at $30,000 to
$50,000 a year.
As we’ve become more and more involved with the families and
their communities, we realized that they had a lack of focus on their
general wellness and basic health needs. This is a region of the state
that has an epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Look at the numbers;
these are taken from a survey of our employees: 11 percent have
diabetes, 49 percent are pre-diabetic. That’s 60 percent of our
employees, 20 percent higher than California’s rate. As for obesity,
34 percent are overweight and 43 percent are classified as obese. It
is a pretty grim picture for health. In an attempt a few years ago
to help this problem, we hired an outside clinic provider to serve
the 7,800 employees and their families in the Valley. However, we
discovered that our employees weren’t using the clinics, and only 30
percent of the appointments were taken.
So we went directly to the employees, and we held 13 focus
groups; we managed to get to the root of the issues pretty quickly.
Problem number one, our health care provider wasn’t doing a good
job. The staff wasn’t bilingual. The clinic hours were inconvenient.
The doctor was only available one day a week. And the turnover
rate was so high, they couldn’t build a feeling of collaboration
with their providers. Many patients were sent away untreated for
everything from flu shots to shortness of breath to sever chest pains.
Medications weren’t dispensed onsite. No one was getting a clear
definition of their health concerns.
We asked in the focus groups, “How would you describe a
healthy person?” They said: “If you’re able to work, you’re healthy.
You only go to a doctor if you’re sick, and a healthy person doesn’t
need a doctor.” And then we asked about diabetes, hypertension,
and obesity. Our employees know they’re at risk. So we asked,
“Why don’t you go to a doctor?” What we discovered is they think
it’s inevitable that they’ll get sick. So they don’t feel empowered to
change. They’re afraid to find out, as many of us are, that something
else might be wrong. If there’s no road map to wellness, it can be
overwhelming to figure out how to do it on your own. They live on
tight budgets and have poor eating habits and a lack of exercise.
And after a long tiring workday, who wants to exercise or take that
extra step to be healthy? And the Valley folks like the rest of us, get
too little sleep, so any additional task seems insurmountable.
So what to do? We need to show our employees that they’re
empowered to make the changes that are necessary in their lives.
And that involves three things: the re-launch of our wellness clinics,
workplace outreach, and community outreach. So we’re expanding
our clinics. We will have new staff, extra exam rooms, and separate
waiting rooms for the children—all this with more of a focus on
wellness and a commitment to our employees and their families.
Here’s our new staffing model. Each clinic will have a full-time
onsite physician and a nurse practitioner as well as psychiatric social
workers. We will have health coaches who will be assigned a full
caseload of patients. Every employee who comes into the clinic will
have someone on their team to advocate for them every step of the
way, free prescriptions given onsite, and of course fully bilingual.
Wellness also has to be ubiquitous at work. So we’re training
our supervisors to reinforce health and wellness as part of a daily
routine. We’ve built stretching and walking activities into each
shift on the factory floor. We have fully equipped gyms onsite.
Employee ambassadors have been identified among the work force
to help motivate their fellow colleagues every day. And they act
as collaborators on our new initiatives and give feedback on how
programs are working on a day-to-day basis. At every break on the
factory floor, employees are given free healthy snacks, nuts, and
fruit, and our cafés have more affordable, healthy options with an
all-you-can-eat salad bar with protein for two bucks.
The final component of our three-tier strategy is community
outreach. People live far away and their kids couldn’t come into the
clinic, so we have to go out to the communities. At satellite locations,
we will find promotoras, or health promoters, within the community
to inspire and motivate the people in the towns where they live. We
will establish exercise programs, fitness challenges, health education,
wellness workshops, nutritional cooking, and so forth.
There’s a lot of work to be done and an aggressive time line
to do it in. Our goal is to have our new clinics open in October.
So here is my action pledge: I pledge to create and implement a
holistic approach to wellness and health with a clearly defined road
map for our employees and their families in the Central Valley of
California. I further pledge to reduce incidence of obesity, disease,
and stress in their lives. And your prayers would be most welcome.
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