Five Hints to Feed Your Team’s Anchor Cohort Application

Five Hints to Feed Your Team’s Anchor Cohort Application

We are well into our recruitment for the next Nourish Cohort and are impressed by the diversity and quality of teams hustling to put together an Expression of Interest (EOI) for one of the two remaining intake dates. The next intake is February 24.

Here are five hints to help strengthen your team’s chances of earning a planning grant and a spot in the 2021-2023 Nourish Anchor Cohort. Usually our team stays away from food metaphors, but on this occasion when we’re all a little strung out from COVID, they come too easily to resist.

1. Dig into the local history and ecology  

So often we take the things that keep us healthy for granted - clean air, clean water, fertile soils - until they’re gone. Or, we think we can engineer our way out of the problems we face without considering the historical and ecological realities that got us into a tough spot in the first place. We might not talk about racial health gaps or about the legacies of colonial violence because we feel we don’t have the time, enough data, the mandate, or the ‘bandwidth’ - and so we let these pernicious realities persist. But what if the land could speak? What clues would it give your team?

The local ecology and history offer critical insights when trying to understand the wicked problems facing the Canadian health sector, whether it’s tracing a story of climate changes or confronting the legacy of colonial violence that touches every part of this country.  In the EOI, we ask teams about the “demographics, geographical, ecological, and historical features” of your community. Take this question as an invitation to deepen your relationship with the land and history around you. For settler health care leaders googling “Whose traditional territory am I on?” and landing at NativeLand.ca, don’t stop at listing the Indigenous peoples named on the site; go find out what those groups are doing today, and find out what it might take to invite them to the table. 

2. Talk power and sow a diverse dream team

Nourish’s mission is to unlock health care anchor leadership through food - within and beyond health care walls. The two pillars we’re looking for in teams are (1) strong cross-departmental engagement from within the lead health care organization and (2) strong engagement from partner organizations that reflect the diversity of the community. There can be significant power differentials between these groups, which is the reason for the Nourish planning grants. They are meant to support teams to build diverse multi-stakeholder collaboratives; a priority for Nourish because we believe this diversity is what will enable teams to transcend silos, find new ways of working, and tap into the collective wisdom and resources of communities.

Use the planning grants to build these diverse teams and bring people to the table: to compensate an Elder with an honorarium for their contributions to your team, to pay a community organization to contribute to application development, or to host a virtual conversation where prospective team members can contribute their hopes for a collaboration. The strongest planning grant requests are from teams dedicating their budgets to addressing power imbalances between stakeholder groups and building the relationships and capacity for a diverse team to come together. Planning grant requests for projects that jump to solutions will be declined; this is the work that we’ll get into with the cohort. To start: go slow, to go far. 

3. Bite off more than you can chew 

Well haven’t we all, already! But this one’s not about juggling roles as a health leader turned teacher-chef-caregiver in a pandemic - it’s about humility. Every prospective team making an application to Nourish is asked to frame a “wicked problem” their collaborative will tackle. Thus far, teams have framed wicked problems like food insecurity in their communities, systemic racism in health care, food waste, marginalization of Indigenous food knowledge, and the negative ecological impacts of hospital food, among others. None of these are problems one person or one organization can tackle. By their nature as wicked problems, they will persist until we get to their complex roots, and work collaboratively to disentangle them from the other wicked problems to which they are inevitably linked.  

Setting out to tackle wicked problems requires humility that understands it will take a whole lot more than one person or one organization gnawing at the thing to get it to unravel. In applications to Nourish, we are looking for prospective teams that showcase this humility and commitment to working collaboratively, and that have the courage to be explicit about the tensions and tough conversations they might have to negotiate as a team. Working effectively together for two years will take respect and stamina, and we’re looking for teams that are going in with their eyes open. We are not searching for a silver bullet, but instead seek what transition designers call “ecologies of interventions” that understand the complex nature of problems and solve for root causes along with the symptoms.

4. Sprout the post-COVID future

It’s tempting in a crisis - and sometimes inevitable - to get wrapped up in the moment and to lose the greater perspective. COVID demands focused attention on urgent issues, but it’s also highlighting critical flaws that are worth addressing in the longer term. Today’s urgent issues provide clues into critical longer-term opportunities: addressing immediate disruptions to supply chains raises questions about long-term resilience and diversification; addressing food insecurity exacerbated by the pandemic reveals the opportunity for greater attention on the social and ecological determinants of health; crises in long-term care provoke deeper consideration about the quality of care provided to society’s most elderly, and so on.   

Nourish invites prospective teams to apply with a COVID-focus that balances shorter- and longer-term objectives of responding to the pandemic. Teams can use their two-year cohort experience to at once address the urgent issues of COVID-19 while pursuing innovation around the critical faults the pandemic has revealed.  

5. Add us to your team’s recipe

There are multiple channels to get support from our team as yours develops its application. If your team didn’t snag a spot in the six-part Transition Design course that is currently (full and) underway, be sure to download the Nourish Recruitment Package, rich with guidance and exercises to support team development. Our program managers are also available to help coach your teams, and can be reached by email or phone. Milk these resources! They’re designed to strengthen your collaborations and to sharpen your problem-solving and innovation skills adding value for your work and community, even if your team isn’t invited to be part of the cohort.

By setting out on this anchor leadership journey, teams are undertaking a significant multi-year commitment to innovation in the Canadian health sector. This journey starts with awareness of place, awareness of personal and organizational power, and awareness of the interconnections between wicked problems, that together, we can work to transcend.

Sustainable Menu Guide & Launch Webinar November 12, 2020

We are pleased to share the new website for the Sustainable Menus Guide for health care!

The outcome of a Nourish national collaborative project, the Guide was designed and written by, and for, health care food service managers and directors.

The Guide helps health care food service managers to make increasingly sustainable menus, one step at a time. The Guide simplifies efforts to reduce the environmental impact of diets, while improving the offering of healthy, affordable, acceptable, and fair food for clients.

The Guide presents research on possibilities for making more socially, environmentally, and economically responsible choices,. The Guide is organized to walk users through menu design process, organized by food category: from soups and main meals to desserts, beverages, and snacks.

Register for Sustainable Menu Guide Launch Webinars on November 12, 2020 from 1 - 2 pm EST

Congratulations to the Innovator team who’s hard work and collaboration is behind this guide. They would love to hear how you are using the guide and are available to support its adoption, Contact: info@menudurable.ca

2020 Transitions: Reframing Food for a New Era of Health for People & Planet

Innovators like Josée Lavoie from Ste Justine are demonstrating that it’s win-win for hospitals to design for the wellbeing of people and the planet.

A decade is coming to a close this year. Soon we’ll turn the calendar to 2020, a number associated with perfect vision and the power of hindsight. The new year is calling for perspective - a cue to look backward even as we move forward. For our team at Nourish, this has been the work of the last few months: to hurry up and stand still. To take stock of three active years of programming, from the selection of twenty-five Nourish Innovators in 2016 to a Spring symposium of two-hundred in 2019. In the summer we published our Developmental Evaluation Report and since then we’ve been doing a lot of listening - to friends, partners, and to community and health leaders across the system - to process what is needed to scale Nourish’s work. 

One thing is clear to us: Institutional leadership through food on climate, equity, and reconciliation is not a noble cause, it is a health imperative for the future. Between the eleven-year climate window forecasted by the International Panel on Climate Change and the growing burden of food insecurity and chronic disease on the health system is an opportunity to unlock the power of food to build health. 

“One thing is clear to us: institutional leadership through food on climate, equity, and reconciliation is not a noble cause, it’s a health imperative for the future.”

Haida Elder Margaret Edgards, Métis Elder May Henderson, Hodenesaunee knowledge keeper Kitty Lynne Lickers, and Haida knowledge keeper Sue Gladstone share traditional teachings at the Nourish Symposium, May 2019.

Over the last three years, the movement for health care leadership through food has taken root and found powerful voices in intrapreneurial food service directors, hospital CEOs, and First Nation, Metis and Inuit elders who have understood the connections between land, food, and health long before Nourish ever came on the scene.

The Innovators have pointed us to emerging pathways that will unlock the power of food to support wellbeing for people and planet. They do so through efforts to understand and enhance the patient food experience; to design more climate-friendly and culturally competent menus; and to source food that creates social and ecological value rather than drain it. More work is needed to reveal these pathways and to transition to a system whose incentives reflect the fundamental connection between people and planetary health. 

What is good enough for the kiddos inheriting our health system? Aiden weighs in about what he likes.

This work is bigger than a network of the Innovators and other health care intrapreneurs like them. It is the work of whole hospitals and health authorities with the communities they serve. And it’s the bigger work of policy change, or what Montreal-based Nourish Innovator Josee Lavoie calls influencing “the people upstairs.” Because when you’re in the basement of a hospital and it takes a small miracle of sweat to bring sustainably grown food in for your patients, you know the rules of the game need to change to enable hospitals to leverage their budgets and credibility to build health, not just treat sickness.

Going forward, the work continues to be about food, but about so much more than what’s on the patient tray. It isn’t enough for the patient to be satisfied with their food if it comes from ecosystems that are dying and a planet that is becoming uninhabitable. We are calling hospitals more explicitly into their missions to support wellbeing in their communities, supporting health beyond the bricks and mortar of their own walls, out in the environments that are making us sick in the first place. 

“Going forward, the work continues to be about food, but about so much more than what’s on the patient tray. It isn’t enough for the patient to be satisfied with their food if it comes from ecosystems that are dying and a planet that is becoming uninhabitable.”

Harnessing health care’s assets

Capital. Procurement. Human resources. Reputational credibility. Data and evidence. Beyond just the food they buy, health organizations have tremendous assets that can be harnessed more intentionally to build health - and in fact, wealth - in their communities. Hospitals can be places to model healthy eating on a budget - for patients, families, and the nearly 2 million Canadians who go to work every day in the health care and social sector. Hospitals are influencing the behaviours of patients, staff, and markets, whether they intend to or not. My own grand-parents left the hospital with a diabetes diagnosis and the belief that Fruit Loops were good medicine, because that’s what they were served in care.

At the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, Chef Simon Wiseman has transformed the cafeteria into a delicious hub of health for staff, patients, and families, who are drawn by the undeniable aromas of his creations, which are available as take-home dinners. Residents of Grove Park Home actually make money from the bee hives they keep - an initiative that sweetens their quality of life along with their morning coffees… not to mention winning them a handful of awards for their innovation. 

Chef Simon Wiseman shares his vision of hospital food, backed up by his colleague Bernice Wolf, Director of Food and Marketed Services at CHEO.

Climate health is human health

Food-climate connections are poorly understood, my MP told me over lunch a few months back. It’s hardly mentioned in the House of Commons. But food represents two of the top five solutions to mitigate climate change as described in Drawdown, scientist Paul Hawken’s work that lays out the top one-hundred interventions. Reducing food waste is ranked as the third most impactful solution, and is significant for hospitals, who toss up to 50% of a patient tray. Shifting toward more plant-rich diets is the fourth ranked intervention, one with benefits for a health system that spends 67% of its budget on treating diet-related chronic disease. New York state just made it the law for hospitals to offer plant-based options at every meal. 

Food represents two of the top five most viable global climate solutions modelled by the Project Drawdown scientific team.

Culture as a pathway to health

Reconnecting with traditional foodways is a way for Indigenous peoples, who experience disproportionately high rates of diabetes and food insecurity, to chart a path back to health. Colonial paradigms on food safety that judge Indigenous foods “unsafe” are one expression of the unconscious bias against Indigenous peoples that produce staggering health gaps, like a ten year difference in life expectancy compared to non-Indigenous Canadians. But as understanding grows, there is an emerging trend to increase access to Indigenous foodways in health care. Most recently, the Thunder Bay District Health Unit’s CEO and Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Janet DeMille acknowledged that her organization had been an agent of ongoing colonization in its food safety program, and announced a new principles-based approach to enable better access to wild game. 

The tide is changing as we roll toward a new decade, and it’s changing because visionary leaders are using hindsight and foresight to connect the dots on complex issues. Along with the twenty-five Nourish Innovator organizations, the company is growing as more leaders emerge nationally with proofs of concept, calls-for-action, and policies that unlock the power of food to address these complex and interconnected problems. Fundamentally, this will be the work of Nourish 2.0: to support Canadian health care and policy leaders to carve out transition pathways to futures where stewardship around the upstream social and ecological determinants of health leads to better health outcomes - for people and for the planet. We’re actively building partnerships and seeking input on our draft strategy.

Food is the opportunity to bring the health of people and the planet into alignment. But it’s possible that we will miss it, because the health sector is so used to viewing food as ancillary to care. Our friend Dr. Andrew Boozary recently wrote in the Toronto Star, “If there was a drug that could save lives and improve the health of millions of Canadians, you might expect policy-makers to be all in. Or for our health care system to get the medicine to as many people as possible. In fact, such a compelling treatment already exists — access to nutritious food.” 

“ It’s time to replace “How much will it cost?” with “What’s the cost of not acting?” and better still, “What is there to gain? Because the answer is, everything. ”

As we turn the page on the last decade, I’d like to lay to rest the perennial question that has the power to keep old systems in place, even as they are dying. It’s time to replace “How much will it cost?” with “What’s the cost of not acting?” and better still, “What is there to gain?”

Because the answer is, everything. 

— Hayley Lapalme, Nourish Co-Director

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We want to invite you to learn more about Nourish’s strategy to support the next decade of leaders to carve out transition pathways that unlock the power of food in healthcare, join us on January 30th at 12pm noon ET for a preview of our 2020-2025 programming. Register here.