Farm to Plate Gathering

Last week was the annual Farm to Plate gathering to discuss food systems work in Vermont.

The Food Access and Health Care consortium participated in the plenary session speaking on frameworks to build better partnerships between food systems and health care. The PowerPoint, with speaker notes added so you can see what was being said on each slide, is here (note: clicking on this link will download the file). A handout summarizing the basic framework for food in health care program analysis is linked here.

One of the big goals of the gathering was to discuss a new Farm to Plate network structure to go along with their updated strategic plan.

Some items to note for food and health care, related to Farm to Plate’s work plans for 2022:

• Over the next two years, Farm to Plate will be conducting a comprehensive strategic planning project for food access and nutrition security in Vermont. FAHC has provided a grant to include transportation as a barrier to accessing nutritious foods and a barrier to participating in food-related health care programming as one of the units within this project. Look for more on this coming up. The project lead from Farm to Plate will be Becka Warren.
  

• There is a new system of Communities of Practice as part of the revised network structure. One of these will be CSAs for Health Care, led by the Vermont Farmers Food Center, with support from NOFA-VT and FAHC. This Community of Practice will begin meeting in December. The Network website is receiving an upgrade, but you can currently find a survey for signing up to participate from this page.
  

• Local food in hospitals continues to be a strong movement, including leadership from Healthy Food in Health Care and Health Care Without Harm. It falls primarily under “institutional purchasing” in the Farm to Plate network framing. The 2020 Farm to Plate Issue Brief on this topic is found here.