GetShotByElla.com has created and gifted designs to the non-profit Growing Healthy Kids for a line of products that support the organization’s diabetes education programs for children and families. Further information about GHK and its products can be found at http://growinghealthykids.blogspot.com/

The idea to collaborate with the non-profit evolved at the same time GetShotByElla.com was launched, when Nancy Heinrich, CEO of Growing Healthy Kids, placed a special order request for our very first t-shirt! Nancy and her efforts to combat the diabetes epidemic through the education of children and parents about healthy choices inspired “Wellness Butterfly.” The design is composed of healthy foods shaped into a butterfly with the inscription “Wellness is Beautiful.”

In the following blog, Nancy Heinrich shares perspectives on The Power of Collaboration:

By Nancy Heinrich, M.P.H.

Nancy Heinrich is pictured leading children in exercises at a Growing Healthy Kids event, wearing one of the original “Wellness Butterfly” shirts designed for her.

I believe in collaborations.  When you collaborate, you have power.  It’s using the synergistic power of 1+1=3 (or sometimes 30).

When I met Ella Chabot of GetShotByElla.com a couple of years ago, our synergistic power was immediately evident.  Using photos she had taken of a chef friend’s food creations, Ella created a design for me called “Wellness Butterfly”.   Her design, imprinted on designer ladies T-shirts, became my favorite shirt to wear on Thursdays and Fridays when I volunteered at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Indian River County.  Ella’s “Wellness Butterfly” became known to all the kids I worked with for the next year.  They associated “Wellness Butterfly” with Growing Healthy Kids’ weekly healthy cooking and gardening classes and our “Fun with a Purpose” field trips to learn from local farmers and chefs.

Ella’s design work provides a visible connection for the extraordinary vision and purpose of the Growing Healthy Kids movement, and our organization’s work to prevent diseases like diabetes in overweight and obese children.

What do we think of when we see a butterfly?   Butterflies are free.   Butterflies are beautiful, complex creatures and they come in different shapes, sizes, and colors.  They are attracted to many different host plants and nectar plants.  They symbolize how different human beings are and they symbolize the possibility of what we can become.  We change, we evolve.  We have a finite time on this planet.  Let’s make it a time of great beauty and great freedom.

When Ella created “Wellness Butterfly” inspired by the young Growing Healthy Kids organization, she illustrated our purpose and our vision.  To be healthy is to be free.  To be free of disease is essential for our good health.

When you collaborate,  you can do great things, like manifest the Growing Healthy Kids movement,  dedicated to reversing childhood obesity and preventing obesity-related diseases such as diabetes.

1 (GetShotByElla.com) + 1 (Growing Healthy Kids) = 30 (The power to reverse childhood obesity through the design and delivery of programs which improve the health literacy of Americans).  Collaboration is a wonderful thing.  Ella Chabot’s designs are powerful, wonderful, and unique.

Thank you, Ella, for supporting Growing Healthy Kids work to reverse childhood obesity and prevent diabetes.  Thank you for collaborating with me and our organization.  Thank you for your vision and for creating the “Wellness Butterfly” design.

Ella, your company is exactly what our world needs.  When we collaborate, we can do great things.   Thank you for collaborating with me.  Because 1+1=30.