UPDATED: March 6, 2019 at 12:17 a.m.

An Onondaga County clinic focused on providing food assistance and education to women and families with low incomes recently moved to a larger location.

The Women, Infants and Children clinic, formerly located on West Onondaga Street, moved to Gifford Street in December. It’s the largest of six WIC clinics in the county, serving 6,000 people per month. The clinic is located at the site of Nojaim BrothersSupermarket, which closed in September 2017.

Merilee Mohr-Twardowski, WIC program coordinator for the county, said the building on West Onondaga Street where the clinic was formerly housed was sold, and the landlord decided not to renew WIC’s lease.

But she said the move came at a great time.

“Nojaim’s facility was available, and we had a lot of help from our county executive and health commissioner and Paul Nojaim to make this work, to get us near the Westside, where we have a lot of people who are eligible for the program,” Mohr-Twardowski said.

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The federally-funded program falls under the Division of Healthy Families in the Onondaga County Health Department. WIC is a supplemental feeding program, providing things such as milk, whole grains, fruits, vegetables, beans and more to low-income women and families across the county.

WIC differs from conventional feeding programs with its conditional nutrition program, Mohr-Twardowski said. Nine registered dieticians provide nutrition education programs to ensure that low-income families know how to properly incorporate the healthy foods into their diets at the Westside clinic, she said.

The United States Department of Agriculture started WIC in 1974. The program now serves about 9,135 people in Onondaga County, Mohr-Twardowski said. The new Westside clinic at 307 Gifford St. replaced a WIC clinic on West Onondaga Street that operated for 25 years, she said.

Syracuse’s Westside neighborhood is a primarily residential area with many people falling below the poverty line, according city data. The median household income of the area is $14,474.

The program’s income guidelines are updated annually.

Alex Punch, associate director of the Lerner Center for Public Health Promotion at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said the new location is great because it’s near a bus stop and has a larger square-footage.

The Lerner Center aims to improve population health through applied research and evaluation, education and engaged service, among other things, according to the center’s website.

Punch previously worked at the Onondaga County Health Department, in the Bureau of Disease Control. She stays involved as a member of the Onondaga County Drug Task Force and the Onondaga County Health Coalition.

“Its proximity to St. Joe’s Primary Care West is incredibly valuable to the individuals receiving WIC services,” Punch said. “I think it’s a really good move.”

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this post, the date of relocation and number of registered dietitians in the Women, Infants and Children clinic and the monthly caseload for all of Onondaga County were misstated. Also, Merilee Mohr-Twardowski was misquoted. The Daily Orange regrets these errors. 

Published on February 20, 2019 at 8:57 pm

Contact Meg: mkfitzg@syr.edu