Cheryl Hsu and Hayley Lapalme
Nourish has been a three-year experiment in collaboration to leverage the healthcare sector’s influence for transformative change in sustainable food systems and well-being. It aims to leverage the influence of the sector as a big public purchaser of food by tapping into the sector’s reputational credibility in markets and in civil society. Currently, Nourish aspires to scale its impact by transitioning from a person to place-based approach to organizing for systems change. Similar to Ezio Manzini’s concept of cosmopolitan localism, the approach seeks to build more resilient local place-based economies and systems while holding the learnings as a way to connect learnings across the country. By taking an anchor institution approach, which recognizes hospitals as rooted in their local communities that can leverage “economic, human, intellectual and institutional resources” (Democracy Collaborative), the program is evolving from helping people who are disempowered in a system to claim their power to empowering whole3of3organization anchor institutions that act in the interest of developing local health and wealth within their communities.
This paper presents the systemic learnings over the past three years about the food-health system and presents the shift in strategy and form that accompanies a shift in the scale of impact that Nourish aspires to have. Activating these networks requires enhancing the capacity for healthcare institutions to work and collaborate beyond the walls of the hospital and to design for impacts on the social determinants of health within their communities.