Feeding Change at the Milken Institute recently released a report providing Food Is Medicine (FIM) stakeholders with a framework for designing, governing, and sustaining partnerships. The report, Activating the FIM Ecosystem: A Framework for Stakeholder Partnerships, seeks to help nonprofit, for-profit, and public policy actors collaborate in an increasingly complex sector.
According to the report, FIM began as a community-based response to unmet nutrition and health needs, evolved into a national movement, and has now reached a critical inflection point.
FIM programs rely on an expanding range of activities, from clinical referrals and care coordination to reimbursement, data sharing, and food delivery. Coordination requires an increasing number of stakeholders, including health care providers, community-based organizations (CBOs), participants, food retailers, funders, and transportation companies.
This growing complexity can create barriers to collaboration, the report says. FIM stakeholders interviewed for the report describe challenges including unclear roles, misaligned incentives, redundant responsibilities, uncertain payment pathways, and decision-making structures that struggle to adapt as programs evolve. This causes strained relationships, reduces efficiency, and reduces the ability to scale FIM programs.
Increasing resilience in an ever-changing FIM landscape requires thoughtful partnership design and adaptable models, Holly Freishtat, Senior Director of Feeding Change, tells Food Tank. Rather than prescribing a single model or a universal solution, the report offers a variety of tools.
The report is designed to help stakeholders quickly navigate to the sections most relevant to their objectives, sector, and stage of engagement in the FIM ecosystem, the co-authors explain. And certain sections are interactive and customizable. It was intentionally designed for stakeholders across the FIM ecosystem, Anna Lin-Schweitzer, Associate Director at Feeding Change and co-author of the report, tells Food Tank.
“We wanted to make sure that the toolkit was not designed just for one sector or just for one stakeholder, that it was going to be useful to anyone who picked it up,” Lin-Schweitzer says. “Whether they’re a nonprofit or a health plan or a food retailer, whether they have been in the FIM space for a long time or they just started.”
To develop the framework, Feeding Change conducted 43 interviews, two sector-specific working sessions, and a 40-person roundtable, while also incorporating feedback from FIM program participants. Freishtat says the resulting recommendations were grounded in qualitative analysis and stakeholder experience.
The report is organized around three themes. The first, Designing Partnership Architecture, explores a range of partnership structures applicable to a variety of goals, funding mechanisms, operation scales, and stages of development.
The Optimizing Funding Partnerships for Collaboration section, explores existing funding pathways, ensuring stakeholders are aware of their options and encouraging a diversified financing approach.
And Building Shared Understanding and Long-Term Value, focuses on challenges that commonly emerge as partnerships develop, scale, and adapt to changing circumstances. According to the report, aligning goals, responsibilities, decision-making processes, and measures of success can help organizations navigate these tensions in the long term.
Looking ahead, Lin-Schweitzer highlights the importance of cross-sector and cross-regional collaboration, which allows stakeholders to learn from one another and build on existing successes. Lin-Schweitzer also emphasizes the value of keeping program participants involved in, and at the center of, FIM discussions.
According to Freishtat, “if we want to see reduced healthcare costs and improved health and nutrition outcomes, we need to be very intentional and strategic and disciplined on how we continue to design, evolve, and grow FIM for this country.”
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Photo courtesy of Inigo De La Maza
