Living Well Locally is about supporting those who want to create healthier communities using local resources and local effort. By integrating emerging applications in lifestyle-based medicine, regenerative farming, and food systems change wellness becomes local.
By integrating these new methods at the community level, LWL proposes to show how health outcomes can be improved through local effort and with local resources. Further, we suggest how pursuing better health outcomes through active engagement of community residents as consumers, patients, and civic activists, can revive local economies and reduce public expense. We propose to show how building community-based cultures of health can create local wellness economies that are sustainable and resilient.
About Us:
Alison Buehler is an educator, community advocate, podcaster, author of nine books, including Rethinking Women’s Health and Beating Anxiety and Depression for Life. She and her physician husband founded Gaining Ground Sustainability Institute of Mississippi and The Homestead Education Center with a focus on health and wellness in home and community. She is our kick-starter, educator, promoter. Alison lives with husband Mike and teenagers Max, Ben, and Cecelia.
Marion Sansing moved to the US from Germany a few decades ago and later married into a Mississippi family. She is a volunteer extraordinaire, executive doer, and designer; caters community events and teaches real food cooking and fermentation. As the kitchen artist, using well-grown, local and foraged foods. Marion embodies the substance of LWL.
Nancy Woodruff is certified in holistic health, and has designed and taught community classes in ‘real food as good medicine’; she has worked in food policy and research, rural and natural food co-ops, conference planning, economic
development, nonprofit planning and management. Nancy is a thinker,
integrator, and writer. She is retired and lives in a tiny house on a rocky hill.
Alison, Marion, and Nancy met as founding members of Gaining Ground Sustainability Institute of Mississippi in 2008. Their eclectic backgrounds bring experience and diverse yet complementary skills to wellness-focused grassroots work from their homes in east-central Mississippi. They have each taken personal healing journeys, they each struggle to get and keep families on board with wellness, and have each assisted family elders with major chronic diseases through the end of life. They are home and family-centered, home cooks, and caregivers, but also researchers, experimenters, and professionals.
