Bowdoin Street Health Center Featured at FoodMed 2011
Bowdoin Street Health Center was invited to be a part of a panel discussion at FoodMed 2011 – The Fourth International Conference on Healthy Food in Healthcare in Seattle, Washington. Adela Margules, Executive Director and Phillomin Laptiste, Operations Manager, will be representing the health center and BIDMC, in October, at this year’s conference. Our session is titled: Farmers Markets on Hospital Grounds: Strategies for Success. We will focus our presentation on the success of our Farm to Family program and its impact on the community we serve. Other panelists include a farmer from Seattle and a nurse from the University of Maryland Medical Center.
The health center, along with community partners and residents, developed a strategic plan to implement healthy food access programs in the Bowdoin/Geneva community. The Farm to Family program is one component of this implementation plan and brings together an academic medical center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and a community health center, Bowdoin Street Health Center, to jointly provide farm shares for hospital employees while subsidizing farm shares for residents of the health center’s neighborhood. We will discuss the importance of resident involvement in improved food access; the roles that the hospital and health center play in making this program work; the other community partners needed for successful implementation; the challenges of sustained implementation; funding strategies; and briefly touch on the other neighborhood initiatives that comprise the strategic plan.
For more information on the conference, please feel free to visit the official site at http://www.foodmed.org/default.php .
