ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on the Season 6 premiere of “Black Men Sundays” — also, the show’s first episode in 2025 — host Corie Murray interviews Ashley Carter and Jasmine Westbrooks-Figaro, the directors of EatWell Exchange.
Their nonprofit provides nutrition education to the populations which need it most — low-socioeconomic communities — with an emphasis on culture.
“We teach communities how to eat healthy with a focus on cultural foods because so long we’ve been told that if you want to eat healthy, you can’t eat foods that your grandma was cooking, or you can’t eat African-American traditional foods or Caribbean foods, so we teach people the opposite, that it is possible to maintain our traditions and our culture while being healthy,” Carter said, adding she and Westbrooks-Figaro started eating so well while they were co-workers at the Florida Department of Health. “(...) We knew that something was missing and that something missing was culture. So we teach communities how they can use what they have. So, focusing on food access, culinary education and also nutrition and teaching them how they can live healthier and prevent medical conditions with our culture.”
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Westbrooks-Figaro explained how her and Carter’s organization quickly found itself standing strong on three pillars: nutrition education, increasing access and improving culinary skills.
“We have a men’s culinary program, we have a kid’s culinary program, we have a program that is preventing diabetes such as Heritage for Health, which is the name of it, and we have bilingual programs that are focused towards Haitians and Haitian Creole and bilingual culinary programs, too. So, if you like to get in the kitchen, if you like to just cook some of your favorite dishes that you have so many memories with, then that’s what you can expect from an EatWell Exchange culinary program,” Westbrooks-Figaro said.
Carter further explained how things started, retracing their steps from where they grew up and witnessed food-insecure communities firsthand.
“We had the same passion when it came to our people doing better. For me, my parents both passed away at a younger age, all because of medical conditions. My mom passed away when I was in high school, so that really impacted me and just my perception of health, and also I grew up in Liberty City, which is a lower-income area, and Jasmine grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and she experience her grandparents going through medical issues. So the more we talked about, it’s like, we’re in two different states, why are we experiencing the same thing? And then you go up the road to Tallahassee and people aren’t experiencing that as much as we are in these lower-income, food-insecure communities. So we’re like, we got to do something about it,” Carter said. “(...) We had a lot of friends that helped us out. One of our girlfriends is a lawyer, so she helped us with our 501(c)(3). We had a lot of connections along the way — when it comes to my brother, he’s an accountant — so a lot of people like that were very integral when it comes to starting EatWell, but the main thing was just seeing the mission, seeing that people are literally dying from conditions that could be prevented and knowing that we had to do something about it.”
Hear the interview and more in Season 6, Episode 1 of “Black Men Sundays.”
Black Men Sundays talks about building generational wealth. Check out every episode in the media player below.