Our Work
Food has the potential to heal, connect, and nourish. What we put on our plates impacts health at every level—personal, community, and planetary. Canadian health care organizations have a tremendous opportunity to reduce food waste and rethink menus to serve meals that are plant-forward, culturally mindful, seasonal, and sustainably sourced.
Think of a comforting dish, a warm bowl of healing soup, a long-cherished family recipe, and a meal that highlights the best of local ingredients. Food can be all of this and more, nourishing our bodies, minds, and spirits three times a day—but too often, it is not. Especially, and paradoxically, in health care. In Canada, we have a four-billion-dollar opportunity to redirect health care food services budgets to support improved meal sourcing and meaningful patient experiences. And to take action on the many ways that food can support health outside of health care walls.
Nourish envisions a future in which the full potential of food as medicine is honoured and realized in Canadian health and food systems. We equip, connect, and lift leaders, both inside and outside the walls of health care, to leverage the power of food, so that the health system can become more preventive, more equitable, and more sustainable.
What We Do
Nourish works alongside health care providers and communities to identify and support transition pathways: strategies and actions, at different levels and scales, that can lead from where we are now to the future we envision. We do this by:
facilitating conversations and collaboration. With our programs, workshops, and events, we convene thought leaders and changemakers to explore the ways that food in health care can spark transformation and solutions.
raising awareness and fostering understanding. We create opportunities for shared learning about the complexity of food and health systems through creating new narratives and sharing stories that offer hope and inspiration.
gathering evidence and building credibility for new practices and policies. We advance partnerships and support different pathways for Nourish’s Cohort teams to spark change from the ground up. From implementing new food sourcing policies that include Indigenous foodways to eliminating food waste and single-use plastics, the Cohorts advance scalable solutions for health care in Canada.
sharing proven solutions and tools and supporting their implementation. We provide resources and tools through Action Learning, including our Food is Our Medicine online course and Planetary Health Menus program.
Strategies and actions to improve food in health care are part of an ever-evolving framework, the Nourish Food for Health Levers, which help to guide and inspire health care organizations in making change.
Why it Matters
Health care leadership and action around food can have a tremendous impact on Nourish’s three interdependent impact areas:
Climate
Equity
Community Well-being
What We Believe
Our work is guided by the following principles:
Changing a system means embracing complexity. Health care is a large and complex system that overlaps with many others. To determine where and how best to intervene to make meaningful and lasting change, we must acknowledge and embrace the nature of the system. As a result, programs such as Nourish’s Food is Our Medicine and Planetary Health Menus, focus on food through diverse lenses. Through Nourish’s Cohorts, we engage leaders working within the system to test innovative approaches to address hurdles and scale solutions through collaboration.
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Complex systems are made up of many regional and local systems. Solutions must address the unique needs and relationships of people and communities in ways that are rooted in culture, land, and place. This is why we work with the Cohort teams to explore regional and place-based learnings to discover solutions that work. Nourish’s Food is Our Medicine demonstrates how health care and community can work alongside one another to weave Indigenous ways of doing into health care by, for example, serving Indigenous foodways and answering Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action to support cultural safety and mindfulness.
People have to change before systems can. We must consider the mindsets and beliefs that shape the people working inside those systems. To support different ways of thinking, Nourish offers place-based learning journeys, webinars, food demos, and more to explore shared learning experiences we all can grow from.
Where we’ve been shapes where we go. We must consciously bring history into our understanding of the problems we tackle, in particular the history of relationships with Indigenous communities and the ongoing journey of Reconciliation. Nourish is committed to listening and learning from the deep wisdom shared by Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Keepers, and communities, particularly their awareness of how health, food, and land are interconnected. We value and embrace both Western and Indigenous ways of knowing and doing (“two-eyed seeing.”)