A Conversation on Healthy Communities

Across the United Way network, subject matter experts are advancing bold, local solutions to improve health and well-being. Kimberly Pettigrew of United Way of Greater Knoxville shares how she’s helping build a healthier community—one rooted in trust, equity, and connection.

What is your area of expertise? 

I have nearly two decades of experience focused on healthy communities - including a background in nutrition, journalism, access to clean drinking water, nonprofits, applied community development, and even artisan cheese making. While my winding path was terrifying to my parents, my applied experience enabled me to really understand that policy and systems were critical drivers of healthy communities. In my role in Healthy Communities and food systems at United Way of Greater Knoxville, I oversee work within the broad community including institutional stakeholders, individuals experiencing insecurities, nonprofits, businesses, and government leadership to create a more just, equitable system rooted in community. I also provide mentorship and support for up-and-coming leaders and organizations, with a focus on building shared collaborative leadership, collective governance.

What does a healthy community look like to you? 

In my nearly 20 years in nonprofits and healthy communities, I’ve seen that we often start to try to change health outcomes by focusing on needs assessments. But in my experience, achieving healthy communities requires reframing our solutions to be rooted in the assets, wealth, and gifts already available in the communities we serve. While these communities may not be wealthy in ways that are traditionally valued in our culture, the wealth they possess is no less important or valuable. So to me, a truly healthy community can only be achieved through collective action and an abundance mindset. 

What is the biggest challenge to a healthy community?   

A lot of the work I do is within food security. People experiencing food insecurity often also face issues around housing, childcare, transportation, and mental health. In fact, our data shows that people experiencing food insecurity in our community have on average 15 poor mental health days. 
Rather than addressing hunger alone, we must shift our focus on community food security. This shifts the burden of negative health outcomes away from the individual and considers the environment and condition in which an individual is born, lives, works, and plays. 
This has led our work to shift from traditional charity hand-outs to using justice frameworks that offer hand-ups focused on economic inclusion, skill-building, and co-created solutions to complex problems.

How has the landscape of community health changed in recent years? 

When I studied nutrition in college, I left believing that the cause of our adverse health outcomes was driven by our individual behaviors. While I am thankful for my privilege of having an academic background, I’ve found that community has been my best teacher.  
My first job out of college was working at a farmers’ market, and I thought a butternut squash could save the world until an unhoused person asked me how to cook one without having access to a kitchen. That experience challenged my own biases around individual behavior change and made me realize that systems change was needed to make ourselves and our communities healthier. 
Solutions that aren’t inclusive or holistic and don’t address barriers of income, access, affordability, and transportation, will only serve as band-aids and won’t move the needle on impact.

Beyond individual health, what are the broader benefits of a healthy community? 

In the past, we’ve tried to solve food insecurity by giving people food. While that is needed, it’s centered on treating the symptom but not the root cause – poverty and wealth. One of our strategic goals is to reimagine how to solve problems using a justice lens - meaning we reimagine how we solve problems by acknowledging our unique history, experience, and space when creating solutions and making investments. In practice, we’re moving towards built environment work. One example is working with our Black neighbors to restore their once thriving agricultural community by creating a community-designed foodscape in a local park, helping launch a community owned grocery store, and supporting a farmers’ market and more than 100 community and home gardens. 
Another is working with our rural population to ensure agriculture and growing food are protected through zoning and codes. We have 63 community gardens in our city but only three in our county, so it’s our job to track that data, share those stories, and support community in driving change.  We’ve learned that communities know how to solve their problems, our role is to support those dreams.

What programs or initiatives does United Way support that directly impact health outcomes OR Why is United Way’s role important in supporting and sustaining healthy communities? 

The United Way of Greater Knoxville’s role in our healthy communities work is supporting the convening, data, capacity building, collaboration, and resource needs of the community. Our focus has been to use the gifts of the community to build collaborative models to solve our most pressing problems. For example, in our recent community food security assessment, one in five neighbors were interested in food entrepreneurship but lacked technical assistance and capital to get started. So, we are now leading a capacity building grant to establish a Healthy Food Financing Program in our service area that supports assists food entrepreneurs to ensure that fresh, healthy food is abundant, and our most vulnerable neighbors and communities thrive.  

If there was one thing you wish everyone understood about health in our communities, what would it be? 

Food and health insecurities do not discriminate. It happens to your co-worker who is also a single parent, to the nice family renting in your neighborhood, and the young adult attending community college. 
The strongest solutions happen when we unite for change.
In our work, we unite institutional stakeholders with those most likely to experience insecurities to reimagine how we solve problems. 
We’ve learned that effective outcomes must empower our community by cultivating  spaces that build trust, utilize our unique gifts, honor dissent, and discuss how we ethically steward resources for current and future generations. Social connectedness truly does wonders!