Nourishing Conditions for Change: In Conversation with Team London (Anchor Cohort 3)
Perspective/Stories
National Cohorts
Health Care Innovation
Procurement
Sustainable Food and Menus
At Nourish, we work with incredible innovators who drive positive change through their vision, initiative, and action. Nourish catalyzes the shift towards better food in health care by fostering collaboration and shared learning among innovators through our Anchor Cohort program.
Deana D’Ambrosio is Director of Food and Nutrition Services and Michelle Stranges is Process Improvement Specialist at St. Joseph’s Health Care London. In February 2025, as part of National Catholic Health Care Week, they spoke about their work. Here are some highlights from that conversation about the Nourish program and environmental sustainability practices at St. Joseph’s.
How has being part of the Nourish Anchor Cohort influenced your work?
Michelle: St Joseph’s senior leadership was inspired by our acceptance into the anchor cohort program and added the Nourish project to our strategic plan for reaching out to the community. This gave our Food and Nutrition Services team access to internal resources, including leadership support to minimize and remove barriers for the project, and we worked with the Quality Transformation and Innovation Team and Communications teams and a little bit of funding to help.
Our Food and Nutrition services team started the project by redesigning our menu foundations. These foundations support the menu development and product change decisions. We placed patient voice at the centre and made sustainability one of our pillars, along with clinical needs, operational capacity and budget.
Our team started on this journey to improve food waste and brainstormed more than 80 ideas to reduce waste, which were then mapped out onto an impact-effort grid and categorized into focus areas.
Tell us about your on-site garden.
Michelle: Our dream-big project was to have a greenhouse to really localize our food. We toured greenhouses, considered the budget, and weighed the pros and cons and determined it wasn’t operationally feasible. And when the door closed, we made a pivot and found an open door. We reached out to experts in the field and partnered with Urban Roots London, a local non-profit that uses underutilized land in the city for growing produce. With their support, we planted a garden as a pilot project in July 2022. We quickly noticed challenges with the hot, dry months, poor soil quality, and not having a permanent water source. But through the weeds of that first season, we saw potential to tweak and try again. Now, with the addition of an irrigation system and hiring two summer students, we are planning our fourth season.
What kind of activities take place in the garden?
Michelle: In Food and Nutrition Services, we focus on growing vegetables and herbs that enhance meals, like adding fresh basil to lasagna, or items like heirloom tomatoes for a fresh garden-to-tray experience. Last year, we grew 1,000 kilograms of produce to serve patients and residents.
The therapeutic recreation team uses the garden as an activity. Patients participate in planting, watering and harvesting, or simply enjoying the calming outdoor space. The team also used some of the harvest for cooking classes. The garden has provided patients with hope and a sense of purpose.
Covering sandwiches on a plate with a reusable clear dome instead and eliminating 45,500 wedges annually from landfill.
You also have a medicine garden – how did that come about?
Michelle: At Finch Family Mental Health Building, there is an Indigenous Mental Health and Wellness program. After the second year of the pilot garden, the Indigenous Wellness Program Director of our Steering Committee expressed an interest in using the garden space to grow traditional medicines. We met with them to see what they are interested in collaborating on and how they envisioned using the space. We agreed that some of the planter boxes would be the best option for the traditional medicines, and they helped with sourcing some of the seeds that were required for the sage and the tobacco. We also tried a few strawberry plants, a fruit that holds deep spiritual significance for Indigenous peoples.
We partnered with Biigajiiskaan to plant traditional medicines – sage tobacco, and sweetgrass – to be used in ceremonies. Last spring, an Oneida Knowledge Keeper provided our garden a name: Onuhkwa:t Tsi’t KahɅtayɅ’, meaning “At the Medicine Garden,” which emphasizes how it’s providing medicine for our body, mind, and spirit and helping the Earth. We’re excited to continue growing that partnership.
Your team has also made strides in addressing your carbon emissions and taking action on other climate impacts.
Michelle: Our team shifted to compostable or reusable containers with the goal of reducing our waste by five per cent annually. The single-use plastic ban helped nudge manufacturers to supply more eco-friendly options, and we exceeded our goal by reducing single-use plastic by 10 per cent in one year. We borrowed another hospital’s practice and worked with our staff to replace our plastic sandwich wedges, covering sandwiches on a plate with a reusable clear dome instead and eliminating 45,500 wedges annually from landfill. This change also made the sandwiches more visually appealing and accessible for patients.
We have also begun wearing reusable shoe covers, which are used to decrease falls on the dish room floors. At one site alone we used to spend $16,000 a year on disposable booties; by changing to reusables, we’re saving $14,000 a year.
