Accelerating Access to Medically Tailored Meals

This fall, God’s Love helped design and lead the first Food is Medicine Accelerator along with colleagues from Community Servings in Boston, the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School, and the Nonprofit Finance Fund. The goal of the Accelerator is to expand access to Medically Tailored Meals (MTM) by supporting the development of similar programs at nonprofits across the country.

The Accelerator, which is an ongoing project, seeks to refine, replicate, and broadly scale the MTM model, with the goal that eventually no one living in the United States who needs MTM will be without access to this life-saving intervention. The first cohort included organizations based in Chicago, Portland (Oregon), Tampa Bay and the State of New Hampshire.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Accelerator was held virtually this year. The first two-day session focused on how to receive client referrals, onboard clients, manage client data in a secure way, and serve clients well through the lens of nutrition. The MTM intervention creates food security for individuals whose needs cannot be met with less intensive interventions such as non-MTM food programs, food pantries, SNAP, and soup kitchens.

A ‘complete’ MTM intervention includes standards for nutrition, nutrition counseling and education, data collection, food quality and preparation, home-delivery, and health care referrals. The first four organizations are well on their way to establishing MTM programs in their cities. We look forward to welcoming the second cohort in 2021.