Nourish’s third Cohort brings together hospital and community partnerships united around the shared goal of taking action on the climate crisis, improving health equity, and promoting community wellbeing through food in health care.
This third Cohort will invest deeply in developing anchor leadership, signalling a commitment to harness the long-term presence, mission, and resources of health care institutions to anchor well-being in their communities.
Multidisciplinary place-based teams will do this by working locally and nationally on projects that activate existing community assets to find innovative food for health solutions. Cohort Teams represent powerful health care and community partnerships with high commitment and ability to shift policy, practices and outcomes. They are forging new pathways for the health sector to take a more preventative approach to health by working on:
planetary health menus that reduce food-related GHG emissions;
procurement and supply chains that are values-based and support local communities to build more resilient food systems;
food sovereignty and food security initiatives that create health in an upstream, preventative way; and,
action on reconciliation for Indigenous communities alongside work to improve health outcomes for other equity-deserving groups
Meet the Third Cohort
Cohort Objectives
Activate anchor leadership from public organizations in the health sector, leveraging economic, ecological, social, technological, and scientific resources in health and community organizations to build patient and planetary health.
Nurture and grow systems leadership to address the upstream social and ecological determinants of health by developing the capacity of teams for awareness-based leadership, systems thinking, and new forms of collaboration for innovation.
Identify innovations and develop transition practices and pathways for health care and community collaborations that bring about healthier, more equitable and sustainable futures informed by Indigenous and Western systems change frameworks.
Catalyze resources for place-based investment and scaling by harnessing local and regional partnerships to sustain collaboration.
What is an Anchor team?
Anchor teams are place-based partners taking a whole-of-hospital or health authority approach to working with their communities to implement solutions around food as an upstream determinant of health.
Selected teams comprise a strong mix of stakeholders that represent multiple levels of formal authority, influence, and implementation capability within the anchor organization plus additional ecosystem partners, including a lead community organization with capacity and commitment to partner with the health care anchor on designing and implementing system interventions.
What do Anchor Collaboratives do?
Impactful place-based work + collaborative national projects
Anchor collaboratives collectively explore how to activate existing assets and experiment with innovative opportunities to improve the health of their patients, staff, and community in bold ways. They are supported by the Nourish team of staff and advisors as well as a wider Ambassador Network comprising previous Cohort members who accompany them on their journey.
Anchor teams:
Cohort Overview
The two years of Anchor programming are delivered through a cohort model, beginning in September 2023 and ending in September 2025. Anchor teams have an opportunity to address priorities and pain points in their health systems locally while learning and exchanging with peers on a national scale. Programming is learner-centred and incorporates elements of co-design to collaborate on Cohort-defined challenges and opportunities.
The Cohort consists of two main phases:
Consolidating place-based teams, purpose, and projects
Collaborating across Anchor Cohort teams to shape and lead national collaborative work
The Cohort begins with an in-person kick-off at Nourish’s second national Food for Health Symposium in Saskatoon. From there, teams return to their communities to affirm their purpose, place-based goals, and initial projects - as well as ensure the right mix of stakeholders are involved. Building from the Food for Health Levers and place-based work, Nourish offers support with the identification of national collaborative projects that move the needle on health systems’ climate impact, build health equity with Indigenous and other equity-deserving groups, and create better community investments grounded in anchor leadership.
Over the course of the two-year program, teams have the opportunity to come together, virtually and in person, to connect with Cohort peers and take action, building momentum while growing knowledge and capacity with guidance and technical support from Nourish’s Advisors and Ambassador Network. A series of team retreats, coaching, technical support, and working groups scaffold the programming, complemented by access to Nourish’s two Action Learning programs:
Stina Brown
Coach and Facilitator
Stina Brown (she/they) is an accomplished coach, meeting and retreat designer, facilitator, trainer, visual practitioner and consultant. Stina is supporting the Anchor Cohort Project Leads through the journey of leading complex change initiatives, including how to do the "inner work" of systems change while supporting multidisciplinary teams to advance toward practical goals and outcomes.
Stina has been leading gatherings, meetings and teams for the past 16 years and has extensive background in process and systems design, strategic planning, visioning, skills training and group, team and organizational development. They design and lead processes to create new human capacity and wellbeing, new shared awareness, new relationships, new trust, new vision, new clarity, and new plans. Stina helps groups deepen relationships, learn and make decisions together, see what’s real and determine what we want to make real. They help leaders see, study, and support themselves – in service of their visions for what the world can be.
Nourish is thrilled to be working with Stina as one of our coaches and mentors in the Anchor Cohort program!
Dr. Zayna Khayat
Health Futurist
University of Toronto | Deloitte | Teladoc Health
Nourish is partnering with Health Futurist, Dr. Zayna Khayat, to deliver a series of online workshops and coaching sessions for Anchor Cohort teams in the first half of 2024. Zayna, who has over 20 years of experience in health system innovation, will share practical frameworks, strategies, and approaches that inspire teams to implement health system solutions with the potential for lasting and scalable impact.
Through a combination of 1:1 coaching sessions with each team as well as mixes of teams across the Cohort, Anchor Teams teams will each identify a set of mutually reinforcing place-based interventions alongside national collaborative projects that respond to unique problem statements and align with Nourish's Food for Health Levers. The focus of this phase of work is to support the development and capacity for results at scale.
Zayna is adjunct faculty in the Health Sector Strategy stream at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto where she instructs a course in healthcare innovation in the health MBA program. She is also Growth Advisor at Teladoc Health in Canada, and the in-house health futurist with Deloitte Canada's health care practice.
Want to know more? Learn about Nourish’s previous Cohorts!
You can read more about the Innovator Cohort (2016-2019) here, as well as work undertaken by the first Anchor Cohort (2021 - 2023) here.
Questions?
Would you like to learn more? Contact Nourish info (@) nourishleadership.ca