C229 Obesity/Community Health and Population-Focused Nursing Field Experience - C229CKA Task 1

Obesity in Thurston County Children A. See attachment file for Community Time Log B1. The community that I performed my field project in was Thurston Count in the state of Washington. Thurston County is located on the southern end of the Puget Sound. Less than an hour drive to the east is the Cascade mountain range, which includes Mount Rainier, and to the west is the Pacific Coast. The Puget Sound Inlet is the second largest inlet in the United States, and serves as a domestic and international shipping route for commercial vessels carrying timber which is very abundant here. Thurston County receives about 56 inches of rain per year which is about 16 inches more per year above the average rainfall in the United States. There are also about 65 more days of rain each year than the United States average (ESD, 2016). The two major colleges here are the Evergreen State College and Saint Martin’s University. The county seat is Olympia, which is the largest city in the county, and the state capital. Two other cities, Lacey and Tumwater, are connected to Olympia and have no visible border reference making it difficult to realize that you have left one city and entered the other. There are about 262,723 residents in Thurston County which covers an 1 MANG area of 774 mi² (USCB, 2017). Nearly 85% of the population is White, with about 5% being Asian, 5% Hispanic or Latino, and other races making up the remaining 5% (CRHN, 2014). The Nisqually Indian Community is a Native American reservation located in Thurston County and covers an area of less than 3 mi². There are about 5719 registered members of the Nisqually Indian Tribe that make up this community (Nisqually, 2016). Almost half of the workforce is employed by the state or a federal agency (ESD, 2016). The downtown Olympia area is where most of the homeless community reside. Children 17 and younger make up the greatest percentage of those living in poverty at 16.6% (CRHN, 2014). Older style homes from the early 1900s stand tall near the city ce