FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Cynthia Kirkhart
Phone: 304-523-6029 x 25
M: 740/339-3277
Email: cyndi@facinghunger.org
Huntington, WV
CVS Health and Feeding America Support Healthcare Initiative in Partnership with Facing Hunger Food
Bank
Facing Hunger Food Bank was recently awarded grant funding totaling $437,500.00 in partnership with CVS Health and Feeding America that will allow the food bank, and our local and regional collaborative partners to create a sustainable, scalable, and efficient system that can meet the needs of healthcare partners, improve health outcomes, and streamline administrative processes. Through this Food & Health collaborative, the food bank and partners will facilitate and co-create:
- State health policy advocate: Lead legislative and policy advocacy to create pathways for
reimbursement, opportunities for data sharing, and administrative guidance for practices that
support neighbor identification and access to health-related social needs - Payer/Provider Point of Contact: Drive sales and contracting with payers/providers, manage
contracts and quality assurance with healthcare partners, and ensure adherence to standards and
regulations. - Regional Implementation Coordination: Lead coordination efforts among food banks,
partners, and vendors within their state or region around a menu of services that meet neighbor and
payer/provider needs. - Capacity Building: Provide training and resources to food banks to build capacity for entering/establishing new contracts, and scaling and improving service delivery.
Cynthia Kirkhart, CEO of Facing Hunger Food Bank, offered the food bank’s goals during this two year initiative, and praised the partnerships that will support this work to allow replication at a statewide level, saying “Facing Hunger has been in the Food Is Medicine space since 2017, and our goal has always been to make the programming available to everyone with chronic disease to benefit from healthy, nutritionally dense food resources wherever they live, versus being in a place that we had grant funding for the program. We have long partnered with Aetna Better Health, Marshall Health, Valley health Systems, and now we have expanded to include other healthcare partners and MCOs in order to achieve this goal. We know that collectively, through inclusion of many partners, we can achieve much more together, and provide greater impact.”
Kirkhart continued “Through my work in the Feeding America National Office Healthcare Task Force, the focus was based on the belief that everyone deserves fair access to the food and resources they say they desire and need to thrive, regardless of background, demographics, location and/or disability. To make this a reality, we listen to and learn from neighbors experiencing food insecurity, focusing on people most impacted to address the greatest challenges together.
When we center the voices of people facing hunger, we gain a deeper understanding of the challenges involved. These include poverty, high cost of living and barriers to accessing essentials like food, health care, education, housing and transportation. These obstacles often come from unfair systems that limit opportunities and prevent people from reaching their full potential. By intentionally centering people facing hunger, we work together to create solutions that help everyone thrive. It is not often that we can engage in work that is truly transformational for all of those living in the communities at the center of our work, and it is an honor to be entrusted with these resources to do just that, transform food into medicine and our timing in this period of focus on making WV and America healthy again has a lot of support from our legislators, and a special focus of the Governor.”
Activities within the grant and with support from members and other CBOs or healthcare partners, conduct a state or regional landscape assessment within the first three (3) months of the grant focusing on policy, programmatic experience, food sourcing capabilities, research, community health challenges, neighbor/cultural food preference considerations, region-specific barriers to health care, as well as opportunities and risks.
Additionally, the collaborative work will focus on developing a project workplan and metrics business model templates, and narrative questions that will be included in grant reporting, program evaluation, or other ways to track program progress and successes. The partners included in this collaborative initiative include Marshall Health Network; MUSOM Department of Rural Health; WVU Extension Services-Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program; Aetna Better Health; The Health Plan; FamilyCare Health Centers; Southern WV Health Systems, Valley Health Systems; and as the initiative expands, Mountaineer Food Bank, Vandalia Health, and other community-based organizations will continue to be added across the state.