National Cohorts

Nourish’s first national cohort of 26 Innovators led projects at their organizations from 2016 to 2019 to address one or more themes of food for health. The foundation they built envisaged a future where food is valued as fundamental to health and healing. They led five national collaborative projects centred on strategic opportunities and key leverage points. Explore the impact of the Innovator Cohort.

Nourish’s second cohort involved seven teams of anchor institutions from across the country from 2021 to 2023. Each team consisted of health care and community partners. Together, they tested systems interventions that activated community assets and explored innovative food for health solutions. Nourish supported the teams with coaching, mentorship, and training around Western and Indigenous approaches to systems thinking and innovation. Explore the seven final impact reports from each team.

The third Cohort launched in September 2023 for a two-year program with five teams throughout the country. This current cohort is working on place-based solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to food, improve health equity, and promote community well-being through food in health care. In their second year, they will shape and drive national collaborative projects.

This team comprises a collaboration between leaders in public healthcare in the province of BC, with a bed count of over 2,500 with the participating hospitals. The food service budget from the two participating hospitals from Fraser Health (Royal Columbian Hospital and Eagle Ridge Hospital), plus all facilities from Providence Health Care and Provincial Health Services Authority, totals more than $27M covering over 2.7M meals annually.

This team’s project focus includes:

Bringing food into healing, by:

1. Improving patient menu offerings to encourage adequate nutrition for healing
2. Educating health care professionals about the importance of food as a lever for patient health
3. Collaborating with Indigenous Leaders, Feed BC, local vendors and distributors
4. Integrating “Trauma Informed Care” into menu planning and food delivery processes

Improving patient and staff food experience, by: 

1. Improving the palatability of food and reducing wastage 
2. Incorporating more ethnically relevant and culturally appropriate menu items 
3. Leveraging hospital retail food to provide plant-forward menu items
4. Introducing ‘just in time’ dining experiences 

Establishing planetary health menus, by: 

1. Incorporating more plant-based menu items
2. Developing innovative recipes to include more plant-based and local ingredients 
3. Increasing food composting and local food production on-site 
4. Educating patients and staff on reducing climate impacts through food and preparation choices

Advancing sustainable purchasing, by: 

1. Sourcing sustainable plant-based menu items through bulk purchasing
2. Developing new supplier relationships 
3. Supporting local businesses through value-based procurement practices

St. Joseph’s project focus includes: 

1. Aspiring to lead change through food prescribing and exploring educational opportunities.
2. Enhancing sustainability through value-based procurement and signing the Coolfood Pledge to reduce greenhouse gases
3. Continuing their focus from the last Anchor Cohort on onsite growing, and building on the patient experience through the food.
4. Developing partnerships with other organizations interested in onsite growing and sustainable food practices, including Atlosha Family Healing Services.

St. Joseph’s Health Care London

Renowned for compassionate care, St. Joseph’s Health Care London is a leading academic health care centre in Canada dedicated to helping people live to their fullest by minimizing the effects of injury, disease and disability through excellence in care, teaching and research. St.Joseph’s operates through a wide range of hospital, clinic and long-term and community-based settings, including: St. Joseph’s Hospital; Parkwood Institute; Mount Hope Centre for Long Term Care; and the Southwest Centre for Forensic Mental Health Care.

The newly established Newfoundland and Labrador Health Services provides health care to the entire province across 42 facilities in four regional health zones, with a total of 283 beds. This team will be building on their work in the previous Anchor Cohort, starting with a focus on the Labrador Grenfell Zone, which operates with a food service budget of $1,090,060 and serves 222,465 meals annually.

Food First NL is a nonprofit organization with a province-wide mandate to advance the right to food in Newfoundland and Labrador. They bring a high-capacity team, an extensive network, a prominent provincial and national profile, and significant matching resources to this work.

This team’s anticipated project focus includes:

1. Solidifying supplier relationships and processes by being a critical bridge between health care systems and Indigenous communities, organizations, and governments. 
2. Including more local plant-based foods within the work by developing strategic partnerships with food producers and support organizations (such as the Pye Centre for Northern Boreal Food Systems).
3. Convening around regulatory reform by continuing their work from the previous Anchor Cohort to make wild game widely available in health care. 
4. Leveraging provincial transformation by aligning with two of the biggest system shifts in the history of health care in Newfoundland and Labrador – the implementation of the early pieces of the Health Accord, and the merger of their four health authorities into a single provincial health authority.

This team’s project focus includes:

1. Redeveloping menus within Six Nations Health Services, including the Student Nutrition Program, Iroquois Lodge Long Term Care Centre, the Jay Silverheels Supportive Housing Complex, and Meals on Wheels.
2. Addressing food waste and sustainability within Six Nations Health Services facilities. Creating a food strategy through research, community involvement, and quantitative and qualitative data gathering.
3. Building partnerships for a community collective of food producers within Six Nations of the Grand River territory by building and maintaining relationships with farmers, growers, harvesters, hunters, fishers, foragers, and those with the knowledge to share about Haudenosaunee foods.
4. Knowledge translation, in order to have community members understand the importance of local food, healthy food, and traditional Haudenosaunee food.

This team’s project focus includes:

1. Creating a menu list of traditional foods that could be offered to First Nations, Metis, and Inuit populations 
2. Building a planetary health menu that incorporates a lot of traditional Indigenous foods. The menu is expected to be plant-forward but will include fish and other Traditional foods.
3. Building Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that allow scoring for sustainability, including actively seeking to provide access to Indigenous businesses as part of value-based procurement efforts. 
4. Creating a direct connection to the broader health care clients of Mohawk Medbuy’s MEALsource division by sharing approaches, learnings, successes, and challenges.