One of the most devastating consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the sharp increase in food insecurity. In response, a new partnership facilitated by Chester County Hospital is feeding dozens of food-insecure families across Chester County each week.

IN ALL, 100 PREPARED FAMILY MEALS -- each of which serves five people -- are distributed in West Chester and Coatesville over the course of Thursday and Friday nights.

Chester County Hospital supplements the dinners, which are cooked from scratch and shared by the West Chester-based Filet of Soul Culinary Institute, including a family-friendly handout that offers basic tips on different wellness topics. Recent tips have included grocery shopping on a tight budget and staying physically active during the pandemic.

Launched in November, the program, which will continue through May, is funded in part by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

"Foremost, we wanted to try to lend our support to the families in Chester County who are enduring some of the greatest challenges during the pandemic. Very quickly, we realized we could have the greatest impact on that front if we joined forces with our community partners," says Michele Francis, MS, RD, CDCES, LDN, the Director of Community Health & Wellness Services at Chester County Hospital. "Everyone involved in this undertaking has a large presence in our community. We felt a great responsibility to meet the growing needs caused by the pandemic."

Joining Forces

Last April, Francis was contacted by Falguni Patel, MPH, the Manager of Community Impact Initiatives at CHOP. CHOP was seeking to support organizations throughout Greater Philadelphia to build capacity to meet the emerging needs. Its focus was on those organizations that were helping to fill in the gaps that were always present but had become much more prominent over the first several weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Early in the pandemic, one of the things we prioritized was communities that often experience the greatest need, but are not usually quickly supported," Patel says.

Francis, in turn, reached out to Lisa A. Morris, the co-founder and CEO of Filet of Soul, Executive Director of the Filet of Soul Culinary Institute, and a Development Consultant to the Charles A. Melton Arts and Education Center, where the culinary institute is based. The center was founded to help meet the needs of West Chester's marginalized populations. Its namesake was a prolific civil rights activist in West Chester in the sixties and seventies. Morris ultimately submitted a proposal to CHOP for $36,000 to support the program.

She estimates that it costs about $16,000 a month to fund the prepared meals program. In addition to the support from CHOP, Morris has also secured funding from the Department of Environmental Protection and the Brandywine Health Foundation to support the program. Participating families mostly are referred from CHOP's primary care practices in West Chester and Coatesville. Nurse Wanda Serdich, LPN, informs families that are covered by Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) about the free meals. Others are identified by the Melton Center, which serves as the West Chester distribution center for the program, and the Bridge Community Center, in Coatesville.

"Convenience is one of the biggest benefits of this program. These are hot meals that families can pick up locally and take home to eat together, without any further preparation," Patel says. "There's also tremendous value in supporting the students at the culinary institute. This pandemic has devastated the hospitality industry. For it to recover in a meaningful way, it's going to require everyone's support."

Meeting The Need

In 2015, Morris and her husband, Traci, opened a restaurant in Thorndale. While the menu -- which sampled from barbeque, Caribbean, and soul food cuisines -- was enthusiastically embraced, it was what was occurring behind the scenes that distinguished the restaurant. The Morrises staffed their restaurant entirely with people who traditionally face significant barriers to employment: single mothers, veterans with disabilities, people with criminal records, economically disadvantaged teens.

Admirable as their intention was, the restaurant was too expensive to sustain. So, in 2017, they closed it and opened a catering kitchen at the Melton Center. Shortly thereafter, their operation grew to include the culinary institute, with funding from Chester County's Department of Community Development. In the first year, 22 aspiring chefs enrolled. Such an opportunity likely would have been difficult to impossible to come by for most of them in the absence of Filet of Soul.

They were trained at the hand of a professional chef and paid throughout their training. Upon graduation, some were hired by Filet of Soul's catering arm. Others were placed at local restaurants.

A $200,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency in 2019 enabled the Morrises to expand the culinary institute, both in terms of its physical resources and its outreach. They established the institute's first formal partnership in January 2020, with Chester County Hospital. Filet of Soul students and staff provided healthy meals and recipes for the hospital's diabetes prevention program and health check clinics. 

"Our partnership with Chester County Hospital was a real springboard for us," Lisa Morris says. "Once we had a credible partner, it became that much easier to find others to work with."

Just as the culinary institute was beginning to gather momentum, the first cases of COVID-19 emerged. "It was very natural for us to pivot quickly and start making charitable meals for our community members in need," Morris says.

Working with different organizations in West Chester, the culinary institute made and delivered meals to seniors in low-income housing at the onset of the pandemic. Over the summer, with funding from CHOP, it ran a paid internship program alongside another program that trained (and paid) people who lost their jobs during the pandemic. All the while, Morris was exploring new avenues to grow the institute's reach even further. That's when she was contacted by Francis, who told her about the opportunity to partner with CHOP to support families in need of access to food in Chester County.

"This program really benefits everyone, from the food- insecure families who have quickly come to depend on our fresh, hot meals to the people we're employing who lost their job during the pandemic or who may have had a hard time getting hired in the first place," Morris says.

"And the families are just so grateful," she continues. "My cell number's on the flyer if people have any questions. I get so many grateful texts about the service, the fact that there are no strings attached, and the quality of the food. It's been pretty overwhelming."

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