Interview with Audrey Sanchez, founder of Balanced
Audrey Lawson-Sanchez is the executive director of Balanced, a nonprofit advocacy organization focused on improving the healthfulness of menus in schools, hospitals, offices, universities, and other critical community institutions.
What exciting things are happening at Balanced at the moment?
Balanced recently launched a major Focus on Fiber initiative. Focus on Fiber is both a public awareness campaign as well as an advocacy initiative. Our goals are to educate people about the relationship between dietary fiber and health outcomes as well build support for our call to add a fiber component to the national school lunch reimbursable meal pattern.
Currently, we’re in the process of getting the word out about the initiative and building support for our advocacy efforts. Focus on Fiber will be THE long-term project here at Balanced for a while, and we think you’d be hard pressed to find a team more excited about the power of dietary fiber than ours. In terms of learning more, people can visit balanced.org/fiber to read our White Paper explaining the need for these critical shifts and/or they can endorse this initiative and/or get more involved by contacting our advocacy manager, Andrea Jacobson (andreaj@balanced.org)
Could you share a few words of advice for people wanting to join the fight in improving our food system? :
A few things come to mind here but they all sort of feed into one central idea: play the long game.
Get educated on the landscape of the movement from a variety of perspectives, and get comfortable with the fact many of those perspectives may be in conflict with one another while also both still being very valid and important.
Connect with others and learn from/alongside them. Figure out who is doing what where and then identify how and in what ways your talents and perspectives can be best utilized.
On that note, also make peace with all the ways in which you won’t be the one to solve certain problems so that you aren’t wasting your time and resources that could be spent doing in more effective ways.
By understanding 1) the work to be done 2) the others doing the work and 3) yourself and the problem you want to solve, the people who want to work on these issues are setting themselves up to contribute to the cause in both high-impact and also sustainable ways.
What are your thoughts on teaching nutrition in schools? Do you think this is a possibility for the future?
In general, I think nutrition education is highly valuable regardless of when/where it’s taught. That being said, I do feel a certain amount of reluctance to rely on it as the key lever for making change. As it is, nutrition education has been around for decades in a variety of formats. The challenge, though, is that while we’ve invested more and more into nutrition education over the years, we’ve done very little to address food environments and/or making it easier for people to apply what they learn. An example of this is that nutrition is often taught in schools - in most grades - but then we send those children into their lunchrooms and ask them if they want a highly-processed corn dog or pepperoni pizza for lunch. It sends mixed messages, reinforces the unhealthy habits we’re trying to guard against with that education, and in the long term it’s down right disempowering to tell children to do one thing but never create an environment in which they can successfully apply what they’ve been taught.
What positive changes are you seeing in this space at the moment?
I think over the past five years or so, the work in this space has become really nuanced and sophisticated while also becoming more and more approachable to a broader audience. With so many organizations, businesses, and individuals working to improve the food system, it feels like the decades’ worth of work that has laid the foundation for success is coming to fruition. The idea that plant-rich/plant-based/etc… is now a more mainstream idea isn’t an accident, and I think we’re really well positioned to not only keep this conversation going but to build on it and also actually create policies and tools that make long-term change more accessible and sustainable.
What motivates you?
Broadly: I am highly motivated by the idea of building simple, practical solutions for complex problems. The complexity, while sometimes overwhelming, also allows a certain freedom for experimentation and innovation. For me personally, the process of distilling down that complexity and building something approachable to address it is very rewarding.
At Balanced specifically: The fact that not only do I get to work on those problems with some of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know, but even more close to my heart is that I’ve been given the opportunity to take care of those people while we build the organization together.