In September 2020, Moveable Feast started work on a new three-year strategic plan. It seemed like a daunting task – to step back and chart a course for the future amidst a global pandemic, all while maintaining day-to-day services. Since March 2020, we had been working hard to ensure financial stability, adapting our service delivery model to provide emergency PPE supplies and services, all while keeping our staff and clients safe. Yet, we knew how vital it was to have a unified vision for the future as we emerged from the pandemic. We had to make sure that the “urgent” did not take up all of our bandwidth. In addition, as the world changed due to COVID-19, so did our opportunities and challenges. The staff and board recognized that we needed to determine together where we were headed.
Our first step was to engage in the best practice of revisiting our mission, vision, and values. Planning during crisis helped us hone in on mission and vision quickly, and clearly articulate core values that govern how we operate as a team and what actions make us successful. The twin pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism shined a light on our desire to center our mission in racial, social, and health equity as the intended impact of our vital work of preparing and delivering medically tailored meals to people experiencing food insecurity and serious chronic illness. We reaffirmed our vision of being a community that feeds people, fights disease and fosters hope with an acknowledgement of how important hope is to all of us right now. Finally, we defined our values of compassion, quality, integrity and hope while adding equity as one of the core values guiding how we do our work.
As we started to identify our strategic priorities for the next three years, we knew that that we were leaning into the unknown. Could anyone predict what the next 6 months would look like, let alone the next three years? We needed to be flexible enough to envision multiple scenarios that could emerge over time. We also dug deep into our roots. We were prepared for the pandemic because we were already serving people who faced food insecurity and had unique health needs that made them vulnerable in a crisis. We wanted to be able to continue doing what we do best – deliver medically-tailored meals to people with chronic illnesses.
We still face challenges that were unimaginable a year ago. It is easy to get stuck in crisis mode where we end up reacting instead of forging a courageous and strategic path forward. Engaging in a strategic planning process allowed us to look into the future with a clear idea of where we want to be in three years. We look forward to engaging with our partners and supporters in forging that path together.
To meet the needs of our community and strengthen our organization, we have identified these five strategic priorities:
Grow and develop people
Attract, develop, engage, and retain diverse staff, board members, and volunteers
Center racial and social equity
Build an organizational culture that is diverse, inclusive, and continually seeks to achieve racial and social equity
Demonstrate and improve impact
Collect and use data to drive measurable outcomes in nutrition education and medically tailored meals programs resulting in greater food access and improved health for those we serve
Partner to expand reach
Develop healthcare partnerships to achieve financial stability and reach more people experiencing illness especially those facing barriers to receiving nutritious food
Engage the community in our mission
Effectively communicate our stories, services, work, brand, and impact to promote health equity
To learn more about our strategic priorities and year one action plan, please visit https://www.mfeast.org/about/strategic-plan/.
Use 
