Dear Friends,

Happy New Year! 2022 has been a year of recovery, paradigm shifts, and groundbreaking innovations, as well as a year of trying to better understand the longstanding challenges that exist in food access, education, and healthcare. We are grateful to work with so many bright, thoughtful individuals and organizations working to buck the status quo and create new, scalable solutions to enhance systems that have been in place for generations, and which benefit from partners who are willing to take risks, try new things, and share great ideas.

It has been another thrilling year in the Foundation’s areas of focus:

Food Access - particularly improving options and quality in K-12 school and summer food programs supported by the USDA
Health and Wellness - especially successful solutions that consider and value the interconnectedness between mental, physical, social and emotional well-being
High-Quality Education for Every Child - there are so many students with a variety of gifts and assets, but without the advantage or proximity to communities or centers of education that allow them to prosper. It takes a village, certainly, and that village needs to exist for all children in order to ensure a very solid foundation for the future of our country.
Optimizing the impact of existing public support programs like P-EBT and the Earned Income Tax Credit

As you may remember, when we launched this foundation six years ago, our first project was collaborating with the City of Boston and Boston Public Schools (BPS) to transform the kitchens and cafeterias in over one hundred schools to allow for a new model for spending federal USDA school food and summer meal funding. This model enables BPS to hire and train more cafeteria staff and provide on-site scratch cooking for every student. Last year, the City completed construction of all school kitchens in BPS, the result of a multi-year collaboration with three mayors and three superintendents. This year, in spite of staff shortages within the BPS food and nutrition program, we remain devoted and committed to the BPS students and staff who deeply enjoy and benefit from My Way Café.

Local Lunchbox grew out of our school food work in Boston in response to the enormous gap in food access for kids and teens while schools were closed during the pandemic. Taking inspiration from the work of chef José Andrés, Local Lunchbox partners schools (like Cristo Rey Boston) as well as after-school and summer programs with local restaurants like Boloco, Daily Table, Fresh Food Generation, and Spinelli’s – providing delicious, culturally-familiar meals to children in communities throughout Massachusetts. This year, we expanded Local Lunchbox to Chicago in partnership with the Obama Foundation, showcasing the versatility of this innovative program. The Local Lunchbox program has served over five million meals since its inception in 2020. We look forward to continuing to grow this program in the coming year, and we are honored to have one of our team members serve on Governor-elect Maura Healey’s transition team to advise her on policies for supporting youth across Massachusetts.

Our work on school food made us more keenly aware of the overlap between education and health care. As we recover from the impacts of the pandemic, our country has seen a steep rise in mental health illness among K-12 students, and we have worked to better understand the underlying mechanisms driving this crisis, including the impacts of social media. To learn more about how the rise of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and related illness is playing out in the classroom, we organized and hosted focus groups with school leaders, teachers, and guidance counselors to collect firsthand accounts, and we learned more about the increased burden placed on educators as first-responders. We partnered with mental health leaders at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Massachusetts School Mental Health Consortium (MASMHC) to create a free, virtual summer series for educators on cognitive behavioral tools for the classroom, providing practical strategies to build student resilience. Hundreds of educators across the state attended these sessions and are now participating in a community called “Teach for Wellness,” a forum through which our MGH partners provide monthly wellness tips and on-demand access to experts and peers. The “Teach for Wellness” community continues to grow and is available for free to all educators.

On the student side, we are continuing to explore how to help kids and adults understand the ways in which in-person and online interactions impact the brain’s development, and we have supported a number of efforts in schools to test scalable programs for building resilience in students. In partnership with the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s “Making Caring Common” initiative, we launched the “Caring Community Project” in BPS, an effort to help students identify supportive adults in their lives. We conducted a survey of students in four Boston high schools that found 20% of students were unable to identify a caring adult – a disheartening number suggesting that way too many students do not have an adult with whom they can talk about struggles with schoolwork, mental health, or personal relationships. We are continuing to develop this work and identify strategies for fostering meaningful and supportive relationships between students and adults in- and out-of-school. At the same time, we continued to support Inner Explorer, an easy-to-deploy student-centered mindfulness platform, in 14 Boston schools. 71% of educators reported using the program multiple times every week, 78% said it was easy-to-implement, 81% reported social-emotional improvement in their students, and 80% said they would recommend Inner Explorer to their peers. This year we also partnered with Roz Picard, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab, on the development of a new platform to provide mental health resources and a communal forum for youth in foster care, and we are excited for the launch of this platform in 2023.

Even as the country began to recover from the stress of the pandemic, we continued to see financial distress in many communities, and we grew our efforts to help Massachusetts families take full advantage of the Child Tax Credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, and other new and expanded federal support programs. Working with our network of community partners, we further developed and promoted our FindYourFunds tool to help nearly 5,000 people across Massachusetts access $12 million in tax credits – more than doubling last year’s totals and providing a significant boost to families and our local economy. The FindYourFunds website received more than 500,000 visits from around the country, and national organizations like Code for America and even the White House highlighted the tool as a best practice. And as inflation drove up food prices, disproportionately impacting our poorest neighbors, we worked with the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA) to bring school-year and summer P-EBT to 670,000 families, resulting in an influx of $330 million into the local food system.

In 2020, as Chelsea grappled with unprecedented food insecurity and long lines at food pantries, we partnered with City leaders on a plan to provide direct cash payments - with no parameters - that allowed Chelsea residents to best meet their individual needs. Over the following year, 2,000 families received monthly cash through the Chelsea Eats program, the largest Guaranteed Income program in American history. This year, our partner, Harvard Kennedy School’s Rappaport Institute, published its comprehensive research on the impact of Chelsea Eats, and we hosted a research event with hundreds of political, academic, and community leaders in attendance. It was wonderful to gather in-person with so many friends and partners and hear about the compelling research results, which found that direct cash led to better financial security and food security, enabled people to purchase more meat, fish, and fresh vegetables, and had no negative impact on people’s desire to seek employment. In the coming year, this research will be shared across the country with leaders interested in exploring the potential of this promising policy. What we heard loud and clear from Chelsea’s leaders was that listening to their constituents, being transparent about the program, and delivering on their promises not only made the Chelsea Eats program successful, but also built incredible trust between the city’s government and people.

2022 also saw the release of the documentary film short we produced with local filmmakers examining the impact of this program on the Chelsea community. This half-hour film called “Raising the Floor” had its world premiere this fall at the GlobeDocs Film Festival, where it won the award for Best Documentary Short. The film perfectly encapsulates the spirit of Chelsea during one of the most trying times in the city’s history, and it is a testament to the resilience of this community.

As our school leaders continue to grapple with the impacts of the pandemic, we have been troubled by the effects on our most vulnerable kids. This year we continued to support the MassINC Polling Group’s tracking poll of parents’ attitudes about BPS, and the results were concerning. In September, just 29% of BPS parents said they were “very satisfied” with Boston’s schools, a drop from 41% the previous year. And in December, the poll showed that seven in ten parents are concerned about their children’s physical and mental well-being at school, in addition to concerns about teacher absences and on-time bus arrivals. This poll is an important tool for BPS advocates and helps amplify the voices of those who are served by Boston’s public school district.

This tracking poll data also helps inform our “Last Night @ School Committee” podcast, which tripled its listenership in partnership with WBUR this past year. After each of the 26 Boston School Committee meetings this year, we provided a half-hour recap of the key discussions, shedding light on decisions that impact tens of thousands of students. And as Boston began a search for a new school superintendent, we launched a special podcast series on the search, featuring exclusive interviews with the six most recent superintendents and more than a dozen community leaders. The series was highlighted in local news and set listenership records for the podcast. As this podcast continues to grow, it is increasingly shaping the conversation at the district and city level about the key issues facing students, and we are thankful for the opportunity to bring more awareness to the work of this public body.

Our other podcast, “Catalysts for Change,” has likewise seen terrific growth this year, and we have loved bringing conversations with local and national innovators to our thousands of listeners. This year, we released timely, topical series on issues like the future of work, mental health, and food access, sharing insights from leaders like U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, MGH Psychiatry Chief Dr. Maurizio Fava, and Moderna co-founder and chairman Noubar Afeyan. We love being able to speak with such interesting people every week, and we hope their words have inspired you as much as they have inspired us.

In our six short years as a foundation, we have been fortunate to work with so many impactful partners, and we are grateful to have grown many of these partnerships this past year:

With EdNavigator, we worked to embed navigators into the health care system for the first time, pairing patients at the East Boston Neighborhood Health Center and Boston Medical Center with trained leaders able to help them choose schools, explore special education and multilingual learning opportunities, and address academic concerns.
With Achilles, an international organization serving athletes with disabilities, we relaunched the Boston branch and have grown it into the second largest branch in the world. Each week, we welcome members of a local community of 200 guides and athletes to our office.
With UMass Boston, we helped develop a new Early College model to enable Boston Public School students to receive up to 30 college credits prior to graduation.
With Wonderfund, we continued our multi-year partnership renovating Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) buildings across the state. To date, we have helped create 84 welcoming, trauma-informed family visitation rooms at ten sites across Massachusetts, with the goal of making family visits with children in DCF care more nurturing and comfortable.

There are daunting challenges ahead in 2023, from continued shortcomings in education impacting millions of students across the country, to billions in unutilized federal relief money set to expire, to a continuously increasing prevalence of mental health issues among young people, to a national food access system that still fails to re-think its infrastructure and optimize the funding available. As we have done for six years, we will continue to partner with key organizations and governments to drive innovation, take on risk, and fail or learn quickly in order to ensure that as many as individuals and families as possible have the foundation they need to succeed - in whatever ways they define success. We are excited by what the future holds, and we are incredibly fortunate to have you in our orbit to challenge us, collaborate with us, and build future solutions with us. Thank you for all that you do every day to help us be better at what we do, and thank you for being a part of the positive change we need in the world.

With love, gratitude and light, we wish you a very Happy New Year!

Sincerely,

Jill, Niraj, and Ross

2022 Year In Review