SMART Receives
NY Health Foundation Grant
SMART was proud to be a recipient of the NY Health Foundation’s Healthy Food, Healthy Lives: Supporting a More Equitable Food System grant. With support from this grant, we launched SMART Food for Life, a year-long pilot project that directly addressed the health of SMART women clients by linking those with type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes to: a) nutritional counseling; b) informational, physician-led diabetes presentations; c) the development of a medically tailored, culturally appropriate food plan; and d) the provision of prescribed food. By piloting this project in-house with a cohort of 12 current SMART clients, we were able to develop a scalable, replicable model to share with other non-profits and health clinics.
Cohort members attended monthly one-on-one meetings with our partnered registered dietician Arielle Kestenbaum, MS, RD, CDN/Executive Director at Fare Meals, to develop a personalized food plan based on their unique medical needs. In addition to these one-on-one nutrition counseling sessions, cohort members also attended special in-person cooking classes led by Arielle and Sam Clare. The hands-on sessions featureed recipes tailored to meet the dietary needs of people with diabetes, as well as providing valuable nutrition education and culinary skills instruction. View the Food for Life Manual.
Through a partnership with Mount Sinai’s Medicine Residency Program, we were fortunate to have Dr. Megha Srivastava as our medical expert and instructor for an informational series of diabetes classes. Dr. Srivastava, in consultation with Arielle, also provided an individualized food prescription for each cohort member.
SMART utilized our current partnerships with food vendors such as Shop Healthy supermarkets, GrowNYC, Costco, and local farmers’ markets to help fill each member of the cohort's food prescription.
