To provide free, home-delivered meals throughout eastern Massachusettsto individuals, children and families affected by an acute, life-threatening illness. We provide ourclients, their dependent families, and caregivers appealing, nutritious meals, reaching out to thosein greatest need.
Our immediate goal is to make sure our clients do not go hungry despite the debilitating effects of a devastating illness and scarce economic resources. Our goals are to supply the acutely ill with the nutrition they need to support effective medical treatment and recovery;relieve our clients of the burdens of shopping and food preparation; and provide essential economic assistance to low-income households.
Our objectives within these goals are to:
I. Improve the health, quality of life, and ability to perform normal activities among individuals and their families affected by an acute life-threatening illness. We do so by,
a. providing our clients with calorie-rich, nutritionally tailored meals;
b. helping to forestall or prevent hospitalization or institutionalization, thus reducing medical costs for our clients, the overall health care system, and the public;
II. Ease the burden of nutrition-related childcare for sick parents, and help parents effectively care for sick children, by providing nutritious meals for affected families;
III. Keep parents as healthy as possible for as long as possible, thus keeping families intact and children out of foster care;
IV. Provide culturally appropriate meals for people of diverse backgrounds to ensure that our meals appeal to a range of tastes and, therefore, that all of our clients eat well.
Support for our nutrition servicesis imperative to the clients we serve. Our meals help mitigate medications’ negative effects so our clients can benefit from medical treatments for longer periods. For many of our clients, medications are not useful due to drug resistance, intolerable side effects, and allergies. This leaves nutrition as one of their only tools in their struggle against the ravages of illness. We work hard to serve eastern Massachusetts’ historically disadvantaged populations. Approximately 95% of our clients live below, at, or just above the poverty level and 66% are from communities of color. Our client data also shows that:
- Our clients currently are battling more than 20 different life-threatening illnesses;
- Children and families receive 40% of our meals;
- Our clients range in age from 1 to 89 years, with the average age of 46
- 50% of our clients are female, 49% are male and 1% are transgender;
- 90% of the children who receive our meals come from communities of color;
- 77% of our clients speak English as their primary language, 18% speak Spanish, while the remaining 5% speak other languages, including Haitian Creole, Portuguese and French;
- Our clients live in every Boston neighborhood, and the 15 nearby cities and towns of Braintree, Brockton, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Lawrence, Lynn, Malden, Medford, Quincy, Randolph, Revere, Somerville, Weymouth, and Winthrop.
Our short and long-term plan to meet the growing needs of our clients includes the following strategies:
Nutrition Care through Home-Delivered Meals: Each client’s meals are tailored by our Registered Dietitian, in consultation with clients and their healthcare provider, to offer medical nutrition therapy – the correct balance of nutrients and calories to help the client to combat a specific disease, gain or maintain weight and muscle mass, and manage the effects of drugs and other powerful medical treatments. To maximize the impact of our medical nutrition therapy, we provide 22 special diets – such as low-fat, low-vitamin-K, easy-to-swallow, and low-potassium, among others – that enable us to offer more than 40 different diet combinations that meet our clients’ individual, often complex dietary needs as well as their individual tastes. Many medications cannot be absorbed properly, or can cause serious side effects, unless accompanied by a correct diet. Our meals help mitigate medications’ negative effects so our clients can benefit from medical treatments for longer periods. For many of our clients, medications are not useful due to drug resistance, intolerable side effects, and allergies. This leaves nutrition as one of their only tools in their struggle against the ravages of illness.
Our medically tailored meals, nutritional counseling, and daily contact have an immediate impact on our clients, many of whom would be hungry and alone without us. As medically tailored nutrition keeps them healthier for longer periods, we help our clients avoid hospitalization and an accelerated decline in their health, keeping families together longer. For our clients who are never able to leave our nutrition program due to deteriorating health, we give them dignity as they pass out of life by enabling them to stay at home for as long as possible.
Meal Delivery: Through our service, we stand with our clients as they confront the biggest crisis of their lives; battling an illness that is life-threatening. Five days a week, Community Servings delivers a customized, nutritionally-packed lunch, dinner, and snack to 725 individuals struggling with life-threatening illnesses throughout Greater Boston, touching over 1,400 lives per year. Each week’s menus are planned so that we are able to maximize the help of the 850 volunteers who assist us in our kitchens preparing and packaging our meals. Our freezers permit us to prepare meals in anticipation of a holiday or snowstorm and deliver those meals the day before.
Whole Home Approach: Human needs and human faces are the driving force behind our approach to medical nutrition therapy. Our clients are too sick to shop or cook food on an ongoing basis; their families and caregivers often are too poor, overburdened, and exhausted to make proper nutrition a priority. Experience has shown us that meals delivered only to the ill client will be shared among hungry family members. For this reason, we provide the acutely ill with the calories and comprehensive nutrition they need to fight their diseases, and we provide their dependents and caregivers with nutrition they otherwise might not receive. Just as important, our meals show our clients and their families that their community has not forgotten them.
Beyond the Meal Service: We have developed a multi-faceted model that provides an array of services to help our most nutritionally vulnerable clients develop better nutritional practices through increased counseling and home visits, a monthly newsletter, and community nutrition workshops. Through the expansion of our education program, we support clients as they transition off our meal service due to health improvements by teaching them how to shop and prepare medically tailored meals on their own. This has increased their ability to be nutritionally self-sufficient beyond our meals, preventing relapse back onto our service and helping to establish shopping and eating habits that can support their long-term health.