SPOTLIGHT ON FRESH FOOD BOX

Melissa Olson RD, CDN, Director of Nutrition & Wellness, Community Healthcare Network

Fresh Food Box is a vegetable box program through GrowNYC.  Participants pre-purchase bags in advance and the next week pick up their Fresh Food Box share.  Each share contains 6-9 seasonal fruits and vegetables, plus recipes for cooking. We are applying for grant funding to bring Fresh Food Box to our site in Jamaica Queens because we know it can be such a fun and healthy way for community members to get access to fresh, in-season, local produce.

The Tree of Life partnership includes such a great variety of people in the community - parishioners from the First Presbyterian Church, residents from the new apartment building, patrons from the Queens Library, participants from Cornell's many educational programs, and patients from Community Healthcare Network's Jamaica Health Center.  We are excited to provide an opportunity for everyone from these various organizations to participate in getting fresh local produce each week!

Our hope is to make vegetable box pickups a fun experience, so we will also include cooking demos on distribution days so participants can taste and see how to prepare some of the items offered (for example, how to cook chard or kale with garlic, lemon, and a little salt to bring out the flavor and decrease the bitterness!)

We are applying for a "Food as Medicine" grant from Elevance Health Foundation, and we are just starting to work on the budget details now.  This is 3-year grant and we are hoping to receive enough money to pay for a part-time program coordinator plus all of the distribution supplies and outreach materials needed.  

If our Fresh Food Box grant proposal is selected, we would like to start offering Fresh Food Box program in 2024!