Mount Auburn Hospital awards grants to support community health

Cambridge, Mass. – Mount Auburn Hospital (MAH) today announced up to $10,000 in grant funding to each of eight community-based organizations in Cambridge, Arlington, Waltham, Watertown, and Somerville over the next year.

“Mount Auburn Hospital is proud to be your community hospital, and we want to find ways to honor and invest in our surrounding communities,” said Chad Wable, President, Mount Auburn Hospital. “We share many goals with our community partners. We collectively aim to provide quality healthcare for all by reducing health disparities and inequities for those most vulnerable in our community. It is our hope that these grants will boost local non-profit organizations to help us reach our shared goals.”

The grants are part of MAH’s Community Benefits Program. They fund evidence-based or evidence-informed programs that address community health priorities. Criteria included five focus areas that were identified during our most recent Community Health Needs Assessment completed in July 2021: Behavioral Health, Chronic and Complex Conditions, Access to Care and Community Navigation, Social Determinants of Health and Racial Equity

The following eight organizations were selected to receive one-year grants valued up to $10,000:

Africano Waltham – Africano Holistic Health Program

This is a community-based organization, which works with African immigrant youth and their families to assist them in educational assistance, visual and performing arts, and cultural connections. Since COVID-19, services have expanded to include hunger relief, mental health support, and referrals to other agencies for services such as medical, housing, and legal services. With this funding, Africano Waltham will staff a social worker to set up needed systems, monitor families, and provide referrals and follow-ups. The social worker will be a central point of contact and is essential to address needs of immigrants who are often very low income, lack skills in self-advocating, struggle with English, may be undocumented, and are likely overwhelmed with multiple stressors.

Arlington Eats – Fresh Bucks Program

In its first season, the Fresh Bucks farmers’ market voucher program was a huge success providing

vouchers to clients who may not otherwise have the ability to pay for fresh, healthy food at the Farmers’ Market. This allows people to increase their purchasing power at the local farmer’s market. This funding will allow Arlington EATS to continue increasing access to fresh local food to clients. To advertise this program, EATS will continue to place Fresh Bucks and information in multiple languages about the Fresh Bucks programs in bags, which are distributed at EATS Market and place flyers in the community.

Arlington EATS Fresh Bucks Program allows individuals access to a community experience where they can shop locally with the rest of their community.

City of Watertown - SNAP Match Program at the Farmer’s Market

Watertown’s SNAP Match Program, provides eligible (SNAP enrolled) customers a match of up to

$15 in free market dollars every week at the farmer’s market. The Healthy Incentive Program (HIP), an affiliated benefit for all enrolled in SNAP, HIP is an instant rebate, which can only be used to access

fresh produce at a farmer’s market or CSA, through HIP certified vendors. This funding will support the market’s growing SNAP Match Program and affiliated HIP programs, which increased over 50% from 2020 to 2021, a result of ongoing efforts with outreach and education about the market’s food assistance programs.

DeNovo Center for Justice and Healing - Culturally informed psychological Counseling

DeNovo Center for Justice and Healing provides culturally informed psychological counseling to uninsured or underinsured adults who are unable to access help by other means, filling a critical gap in access to mental health services for people with low incomes. This funding will support free or low-cost mental health services including individual therapy, group counseling, assessments and referrals, and case management to help clients heal the emotional effects of violence, abuse, torture and poverty.

Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers (MAPS) - Mental Health Counseling Initiative

This grant will help MAPS expand its pilot short-term, temporary, remote and free Mental Health Counseling Initiative. The project will benefit those who speak little to no English and find it difficult to access critical mental health services due to economic, language, cultural, and/or other barriers such as unfavorable immigration status. The new counseling program utilizes six experienced, bilingual/bicultural Portuguese-speaking counselors—three from within MAPS outside their regular program hours, and 3 consultants from the community who have worked with MAPS for many years.

Somerville Homeless Coalition – Project Soup, Resource Navigator/Case Worker

This funding will support a resource navigator. The primary responsibilities of the resource navigator will be to connect families and individuals to public and private benefits to boost household income. Our aspiration is to use this pilot as a pivot point to move away from a “crisis response model” to a proactive “upstream intervention model”. This paradigm shift allows for more critical time and opportunity to introduce clientele to a greater range of services and support. Our goal is to help families access resources, which they have found previously unobtainable, to increase household income (e.g., access to job programs) and decrease household expenditures (e.g., securing benefits), thereby fostering a more stabilized lifestyle.

Transition House – Recruiting Trauma Informed Counselors Representing the BIPOC Community Counseling services at Transition House are regularly over-booked and unavailable for new participants. To meet this need, this funding will help us to train and recruit additional counselors in the community. These counselors, much like our current staff, would represent Black and POC communities as well as non-English speaking communities to expand our community team's counseling capacity and make counseling services more accessible to people from these communities.

Waltham Fields Community Farm – Produce Prescription Program

This funding will support our Produce Prescription Program (also known as Veggie Rx). We will supply a 20-week CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share of produce to up to 30 participants. Participants are chosen by their health care provider to have or be clinically at risk for an identifiable diet or nutrient- related disease (e.g., pre-diabetic). The healthcare provider writes a “vegetable Rx” to the participant, who may be a child - in which case their parent/guardian has agreed to participate as well. The weekly share reflects what has been recently harvested, and typically is ample vegetables for a family of four. While a “veggie prescription” may be written by a health care provider for a particular patient, it is, in effect, a prescription for the whole household. Change is more likely to be lasting when habits are changed at the household level and food prepared with fresh vegetables is for all to try.

About Mount Auburn Hospital

Mount Auburn Hospital was founded in 1886. A teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, its mission is to provide clinically excellent care with compassion and to teach students of medicine and the health professions. For more information about Mount Auburn Hospital, please visit https://www.mountauburnhospital.org/.

Mount Auburn Hospital is a part of Beth Israel Lahey Health, a health care system that brings together academic medical centers and teaching hospitals, community and specialty hospitals, more than 4,800 physicians and 36,000 employees in a shared mission to expand access to great care and advance the science and practice of medicine through groundbreaking research and education. For more information about Beth Israel Lahey Health, please visit www.bilh.org.

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