The Evolution of Our Food Security Work: Bringing Community Power to Food is Medicine

By Health Leads Director of Programs Sarah Primeau and Executive Director Tigee Hill

Over the past five years, we have been grateful to co-lead with our partners at Vital CxNs The Neighborhood Food Action Collaborative (NFAC), an equity-driven, community-led initiative with 30 cross-sector organizations and more than 50 community members. NFAC was created to address Boston’s fragmented, inequitable, and under-resourced food distribution system by placing decision-making power in the hands of those most affected by food insecurity. The results of this collaborative initiative offers a replicable model for other communities that understand the value of locally-designed and managed food security solutions. Consistent with our approach to guide transitions to community-led, sustainable initiatives, NFAC was designed as a timebound initiative with a clear goal: share power, build infrastructure, and ultimately transfer leadership to community members and local organizations.​  With community leadership well established, supported by the tools, knowledge, and hyper-local infrastructure needed for sustained ownership, trusted local leader Vital CxNs is now supporting the collaborative as the sole backbone organization. 

After more than four years of dedicated backbone support, NFAC’s food distribution partners – the Food Access Volunteers of Roslindale (FAVOR) and the Hyde Park Food Pop-Up – will carry forward their powerful missions independently to provide critical food resources to families facing food insecurity. This marks an exciting milestone and we celebrate this transition as a testament to their leadership, sustainability, and the power of community-driven solutions and supports.

Building on the success of NFAC, in our next phase of work, we  are applying years of lessons learned and long-standing partnerships to the intersection of Food Is Medicine (FIM) and the Community Health Worker (CHW) workforce – two powerful and underutilized levers for addressing racial disparities in health outcomes.

This shift was dictated by community members themselves. Time and again, the community members we have worked with to address food inequities have shared their struggles in accessing culturally appropriate food and nutrition support from their primary care providers. Many had never heard of programs that could have helped them while others found the resources to be limited, difficult to navigate, or culturally irrelevant.

Food is Medicine (FIM) programs provide medically tailored meals, produce prescriptions, and other nutrition supports. These services empower individuals to make food choices that help prevent and manage chronic conditions like diabetes and heart disease. But to deliver FIM’s full potential to improve health in under-resourced Black, Indigenous, Latinx, AAPI, and immigrant communities, programs must be designed by and with the people who use and refer to them. 

That’s where community health workers (CHWs) come in. As trusted leaders with lived experience and deep community ties, CHWs are uniquely positioned to co-design and deliver programs that reflect culture, honor dignity, and expand real access to nourishing food. Equipping CHWs to lead is how Food is Medicine can fulfill its true potential.

Our Approach: Train, Equip or Invest, and Integrate CHWs into Co-Designed Culturally Tailored FIM Delivery

With nearly 30 years of experience working alongside community-based workforces – including CHWs, doulas, peer support specialists, and caregivers – we are launching a multi-year initiative in partnership with Tufts University School of Medicine Community Health Workers Engaging in Integrated Care (COHERE) program. This program focuses on training and equipping CHWs to co-design and provide medically-tailored nutrition education and lead decolonized, culturally congruent FIM interventions that build trust, increase participation, and improve health outcomes for under-resourced communities. By embedding CHWs as designers and implementers of culturally-aligned FIM programs, we aim to shift the model of care from band-aid, top-down interventions to proactive, people-centered solutions that respect, reflect, and incorporate the cultural preferences and lived experiences of the communities they aim to serve. 

Real Systems Change Starts with Community

The journey from NFAC to FIM is a natural evolution of what happens when you invest in community leadership, build trust, and stay accountable to the people who know their local area, culture and resource needs best. We are deeply grateful to VitalCxNs for their foundational partnership and all they’ve contributed to NFAC’s design success, and we’re excited for the collaborative’s next chapter ahead. As we carry NFAC’s lessons forward, we are excited to create a model with FIM programs that reflect the priorities, preferences, and lived experiences of the people they serve – and partner with trusted CHWs to deliver care that is rooted in equity.

Learn more about our Food Is Medicine initiative here.

Curious where this work is headed or interested in collaborating? Let’s talk.