Community Servings

Community Servings' mission is to actively engage the community to provide scratch-made medically tailored meals to individuals and their families experiencing critical or chronic illness and nutrition insecurity. We commit, in all our programs and business practices, to prioritize racial and economic justice and health equity.

We envision a world in which everyone has access to the nutritious food they need for health and wel

Goal One: We will scale our medically tailored meal program to reach more individuals, dependent children & caregivers affected by food insecurity & severe illness. By FY24, we will provide 1.2M meals annually.

Goal Two: We will continue to advocate for medically tailored meals as a healthcare intervention &, through our Food is Medicine Accelerator, incubate/scale medically tailored meal programs across the country.

Goal Three: We will invest in our organization to preserve what has made us successful so far, and grow robust enough to achieve our goals. This includes advancing racial equity and social justice initiatives.

Community Servings is committed to investing in leadership development at all levels of our agency to build capacity, retain staff, enhance our efficacy and agility, and foster a positive workplace culture. Over the past 12-18 months, key investments in leadership include: - Staff participated in a certificate program through the Institute for Nonprofit Practice to gain the skills, knowledge, and networks needed to make strategic, mission-driven decisions that center DEI and effect meaningful change. - Staff participated in the Massachusetts Institute for Community Health Leadership offered by Blue Cross Blue Shield to help participants increase their impact and effectiveness and enhance their organization’s influence in addressing challenges and opportunities. - Our 13-person leadership team completed components of the Annie E. Casey Race Matters Toolkit.

Over the past year, as COVID-19 raged throughout the Commonwealth, we innovated and adapted our home-delivered, medically tailored meal model on a weekly, if not daily, basis, with the goals of continuing to serve our clients and their families experiencing illness and food insecurity while expanding our operations to reach additional community members in need. Over the past year, we increased the production of our medically tailored meals by more than 75% to almost 74,000 meals per month. Given the pandemic’s outsized impact on low-resource communities and communities of color, we expanded our presence in Black and Latinx communities and Massachusetts’ Gateway Cities (midsize urban centers that anchor regional economies across the state and face social and economic challenges). With an increasingly diverse client base, we prioritized adapting our nutrition program to ensure our outreach strategy, client communications, menu development, and nutrition education and counseling reflect a culturally competent approach. To support our tremendous growth and mitigate a 60% reduction in volunteerism due to COVID-19 and social distancing guidelines, we hired 17 additional staff members, primarily in delivery, kitchen, nutrition, and client services departments. We developed new programs and program components to more effectively meet the needs of our clients and their families over the past year. This includes the launch of a COVID Meals Program for food-insecure community members with a diagnosis of COVID-19, and the provision of medically tailored shelf-stable meal boxes to our clients and their families. We implemented key operational changes to promote the safety of our community, staff, and clients, such as a “no-contact” home delivery model and increased sanitation of our building and delivery vans, and we collaborated with more food vendors to ensure we could mitigate food supply chain issues and secure the food products needed to prepare 74,000+ meals per month.