The Food is Medicine InstituteReplication and Scaling Panel: The Food is Medicine AcceleratorDavid B. Waters, CEO, Community Servings

The Root Cause Coalition’s

THIRD NATIONAL SUMMIT ON THE SOCIAL DETERMINANTS OF HEALTH

New Orleans, LAOctober 8, 2018

About Community Servings

Community Servings is a Boston-basednot-for-profit organization with a 29 year history of providing medically tailored meals and nutrition services to seriously ill individuals and their families coping with critical and chronic illnesses.

We are also leading members of the Food is Medicine Coalition (FIMC).

The Need for an Accelerator: To Achieve Health Equity by Providing More MTM Services to Vulnerable Individuals, Regardless of Where They Live

High quality MTM

intervention

Better outcomes, lower costs (established by research)

Policy change – payers

reimburse for MTM

Demand to replicate and scale MTM programs

The need to adopt and

enforce standards of

quality

FIMC MTM providers serve major metropolitan areas in the U.S., leaving major gaps in service to vulnerable populations.

The Current Marketplace of MTM Providers

Goal of the Accelerator: To ensure that severely ill, socially vulnerable individuals have access to high quality, medically tailored home-delivered meals (MTM), regardless of where they reside in the U.S.

Founding partners are Community Servings, God’s Love We Deliver, the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School, and the Nonprofit Finance Fund. FIMC is also a key strategic partner, and FIMC leadership have actively participated in the Accelerator’s planning phase.Funders include AARP Foundation and the Eugene M. Lang Foundation.

The Accelerator Team

The project planning phase was launched in the Fall of 2017, and funded in December 2017.

We have since conducted governance, organizational, curriculum development and business planning activities, and we are now submitting a proposal to fund a 3-year grant to implement the Accelerator.

Pre-planning; planning phase launched.

Planning phase funding secured; conducted governance, organizational,

and business planning activities; submitting proposal for implementation

Project launch

Sept.-Dec. 2017 Dec. 2017-Dec. 2018 2019-2023

Project Timeline

The first phase of implementation will focus on Leadership, Capacity, and Advocacy.

• Support field-building activities to strengthen the ongoing leadership work of FIMC related to sharing best practices, collaborating on research, and advancing shared public policy initiatives.

• Grow the capacity of existing and future MTM providers to serve more critically and chronically ill individuals statewide and regionally, through sub-grants, innovation workshops, and technical assistance.

• Advocate for policy change to sustainably scale the MTM model with coverage through state and federal legislation and/or healthcare reimbursement contracts.

Accelerator Activities

We will leverage our collective experience and expertise in nonprofit food service, business planning, finance, scaling, and Food is Medicine policy development to bring the MTM model to scale as a financially viable, sustainable business model.

Leveraging Partnerships and Expertise

Questions/Discussion:

David B. Waters, CEO, Community Servingsdwaters@servings.org