Teresa Shufflebarger Shares how UAB Live HealthSmart Alabama Builds Healthier Communities
President Nancy Goedecke with Rotarians Dawn Bulgarella and Teresa Shufflebarger
This week, the University of Alabama at Birmingham hosted the Rotary Club of Birmingham (RCB) for a meeting at the Heersink Conference Center in the new Altec Styslinger Genomic Medicine and Data Sciences Building. Rotarian Teresa Shufflebarger, Chief Administrative Officer of UAB Live HealthSmart Alabama, shared Live HealthSmart Alabama's statewide efforts to reduce chronic disease by improving access to healthy food, physical activity, preventive healthcare, and community resources. Shufflebarger explained how the program partners with local organizations and residents to identify community needs and implement solutions that make healthy living more accessible.
Since launching in Birmingham, Live HealthSmart Alabama has expanded to communities across the state through mobile grocery markets, wellness units, community health coaches, and neighborhood revitalization projects. Kingston community leader Brenda Holifield joined Shufflebarger to discuss how the initiative has improved access to fresh food, health screenings, and wellness education in her neighborhood, demonstrating the impact of community partnerships on improving health outcomes.
Bio for Teresa Shufflebarger
Teresa is a career healthcare executive who has worked in multihospital systems with focused efforts in business and service line development and strategy creation and deployment. Following her tenure with The Baptist Health System and the joint ventured Brookwood Baptist Health, Teresa founded a strategy and management consulting firm, Allegro Partners, LLC, dedicated to promoting meaningful, interactive partnerships between leadership and key constituents. This prepared her well to lead UAB Live HealthSmart Alabama – a signature Grand Challenge program that seeks to unit campus resources, research, and community partnerships to solve large-scale problems, like elevating the state out of the bottom 10 in national health rankings by 2030. Over the last five years, Live HealthSmart has married the knowledge and community engagement of UAB with businesses, schools, faith-based organizations, non-profits, and state and local government to make changes in policies, systems, and environments to positively impact the health of Alabamians by promoting good nutrition, physical activity, and health and wellness. Together with the UAB Live HealthSmart team, Teresa now leads a transformational movement to make good health simple for all Alabamians – Birmingham and beyond.