Our Work
PROBLEM:
School meals in Boston Public Schools were provided by a New York-based corporation, meaning pre-packaged, plastic-wrapped, highly-processed meals were being shipped into Boston, reheated in school kitchens, and served to students. In addition to the poor nutritional value of these meals, this system also had significant environmental and economic drawbacks, with millions in USDA funding for Boston schools being steered away from the local economy to support a large out-of-state vendor.
PARTNERS:
We partnered with the City of Boston under then-Mayor Martin J. Walsh, along with the leadership of Boston Public Schools, to reimagine this system in a way that better served our students and our city.
SOLUTION:
By cooking school food on-site rather than shipping in vended meals, Boston Public Schools would be able to create hundreds of local jobs, spend millions in federal dollars locally, and provide students with fresh, healthy, and culturally familiar meals that they will actually want to eat. The biggest barrier to this transformation was the outdated nature of kitchens across BPS. Working with our partners, the Shah Family Foundation helped build beautiful, modern kitchens across all 125 public schools in Boston.
ADOPTION:
Thanks to these new kitchens, every Boston public school is now equipped to provide fresh, scratch-cooked meals, and we worked with Boston Public Schools Food and Nutritional Services to make it a reality for every student.
PROBLEM:
In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic closed school buildings across the country, disrupting the USDA’s school meal programs that provide breakfast and lunch to 30 million students each day. In response, the USDA waived the typical school and summer meal requirements, allowing for new flexibility including grab-and-go boxes and multi-day pickup. However, despite the increased flexibility in meal service guidelines, there remained major barriers to access: families didn’t have transportation to meal distribution sites, hours of operation conflicted with online learning schedules, and the menu offerings relied heavily on packaged, shelf-stable food that did not reflect the cultural preferences of communities.
PARTNERS:
The City of Chelsea was among the cities hardest hit by the pandemic nationwide, and 4,000 of their 6,255 students stopped receiving any school meals. We partnered with the City of Chelsea, led by City Manager Tom Ambrosino, as well as local food business Stock Pot Malden and the YMCA of Greater Boston, to pilot a new and innovative solution. As it grew in Massachusetts, we went on to partner with the Obama Foundation to bring this model to Chicago.
SOLUTION:
Together, we realized that, in much the same way the My Way Café program was able to utilize existing USDA funding to provide fresh, scratch-cooked meals to students, the new flexibility allowed us to apply that same model to meals for students out-of-school. To make this vision a reality, we needed three things: 1) a food vendor; 2) a fiscal sponsor; and 3) distribution sites. Francis Gouillart from Stock Pot Malden, a culinary kitchen incubator, was the ideal partner, building a team of brilliant chefs in partnership with food truck owner Lorena Lorenzet and firing up his kitchen to produce beautiful, colorful, and culturally-familiar meals for the community, all while remaining under the federal subsidy cost per meal. We joined forces with the YMCA of Greater Boston to facilitate the program and manage the USDA reimbursement, and we worked with community organizations to assist with distribution and marketing to the community while finding strategically-located distribution sites. At each site, thanks to the new flexibility from the USDA, students or their parents could pick up multiple days worth of fresh meals at once, and we immediately began receiving feedback about how much everyone loved the incredible food.
ADOPTION:
Local Lunchbox quickly grew from hundreds to thousands of meals per week, and by the following year we had distributed over five million meals across a dozen retail restaurant locations and three dozen summer programs in Boston and across Massachusetts. This work drew the attention of the Obama Foundation, who worked with us to bring the Local Lunchbox model to thousands of students in distribution sites across Chicago, where it is still going strong.
PROBLEM:
Chelsea, Massachusetts, a city of 40,000 people just north of Boston, was among the places in the country hardest hit by Covid-19, both from a health and an economic perspective. Chelsea is a small, densely-packed community with many multigenerational homes and a large portion of residents who work in frontline jobs, posing a perfect storm when the pandemic hit. As the unemployment rate skyrocketed above 20%, food distribution lines were miles long and still unable to meet the overwhelming need.
PARTNERS:
We partnered with Chelsea City Manager Tom Ambrosino, the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, and the Harvard Kennedy School’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston to pilot a simple and proven approach to help residents get the resources they need.
SOLUTION:
Together, we launched the nation’s largest Guaranteed Income program, providing 2,000 Chelsea residents – a full 15% of the city – with an average of $400 per month over the course of ten months. This money was provided on prepaid Visa debit cards and could be spent anywhere these cards are accepted with no restrictions. Researchers at the Kennedy School, led by Professor Jeffrey Liebman, studied the impact of these funds on the individuals and families who received them, completing monthly tracking surveys of recipients and an identical group of 2,000 non-recipients that tracked numerous metrics including economic security, food security, types of foods purchased, and mental health. The Kennedy School also compiled spending data to better understand where the money was spent and its impacts on the local economy.
ADOPTION:
The Chelsea Eats program was an overwhelming success by every metric. 75% of all the money was spent at food retailers, including local grocery stores, restaurants, and bodegas, and the rest of it was spent on other necessities like utilities, transportation, and clothing. Less than half of one percent was spent at liquor stores and smoke shops. Additionally, the funds were spent locally, with 56% spent in Chelsea and another 32% spent in surrounding communities. And the Kennedy School’s research showed that those who received the money saw improved financial security and improved food security; spent more on food; were able to purchase more of the types of foods they prefer; consumed more fruit, vegetables, meat and fish; and were more likely to seek employment.
Since concluding this program, we have been contacted by city and state leaders across the country looking to replicate its success, and our documentary about this initiative (“Raising the Floor”) has been shown to audiences nationwide. In July 2024, JAMA Network, a medical journal of the American Medical Association, published an article on the health impacts of the Chelsea Eats program. The study highlights a decrease in emergency room visits and an increase in outpatient visits to subspecialists among program participants. Additionally, the documentary short, “Nixon’s Reversal”, produced as part of the Chelsea Eats initiative about the historical context of guaranteed income policies, received an Emmy nomination in the Documentary category at the 2024 awards.
PROBLEM:
Covid-19 caused a nationwide school shutdown, and while private schools, charter schools, and select public school districts were able to offer in-person or hybrid learning, the majority of public school districts went fully remote. This further exacerbated longstanding racial and socioeconomic divides, with lower income districts and majority minority districts more likely to be fully remote. Likewise, roughly one third of low-income households did not have high-speed internet at home, compared to just 6% of households earning $75,000 or more. The longer schools were unable to open their doors, the wider this opportunity and achievement gap would be.
PARTNERS:
We knew that we needed to find a way to allow students to get back in school safely, and that would require affordable and reliable Covid-19 testing. We partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), Massachusetts Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to develop and implement a new testing protocol that enabled students across Massachusetts to get back into the classroom.
SOLUTION:
After conducting extensive research and speaking with epidemiologists, industry professionals, and school leaders, we built up a robust knowledge base and developed a strategic return-to-school playbook. We concluded that, along with proper social distancing and hygiene protocols, schools could successfully implement a safe and effective pooled testing program in order to bring students back. Pooling samples involves mixing ten samples together in a "batch" or pooled sample, and then testing the entire batch together with a single diagnostic test. If the test is negative, all patients in the pool are cleared. If the test is positive, all patients in the pool are individually tested to identify the positive individual. This creates a cost-effective way to test all students on a weekly basis. In January 2021, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker announced a pilot of this program in several school districts, and by March, Massachusetts was the first state in the country implementing a statewide weekly pooled surveillance testing solution for all K-12 students, enabling students to return to in-person learning.
ADOPTION:
By the start of the 2021-2022 school year, 2,300 Massachusetts public schools were enrolled in the weekly pooled testing program, and the program had already identified over 2,500 cases of COVID-19 and helped preserve over 200,000 in-person school days through an innovative “Test & Stay” protocol. This work caught the attention of other states trying to solve these same issues, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) contacted us about scaling our work nationally. We built a new, national toolkit for the CDC and joined federal officials in training seminars with school leaders around the country.
PROBLEM:
In 2021, as part of a pandemic aid package, the federal government passed the Advanced Child Tax Credit, bringing over $100 billion federal dollars to 67 million children across the country. These funds complemented additional funding available to low-income families through the Earned Income Tax Credit and stimulus checks. However, over 4 million children were expected to miss out on this money simply because their parents or guardians did not file taxes. In Massachusetts alone, 58,000 eligible children were likely to miss out on the Advance Child Tax Credit, 80,000 eligible individuals were missing out on the Earned Income Tax Credit, and 220,000 eligible individuals did not receive a stimulus check.
PARTNERS:
We joined forces with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, Greater Boston Legal Services, Children’s HealthWatch, Massachusetts Association for Community Action, and Boston Tax Help Coalition to form a powerful coalition dedicated to helping families access the federal funds available to them.
SOLUTION:
Together with our partners, we created a new tool called “FindYourFunds” to help zero-income and low-income households who traditionally do not file taxes understand and access the funds for which they are eligible. This single, trustworthy source included information on all available federal benefit programs, walked each user through a personal set of questions to determine their eligibility, and provided online, by-phone, and in-person options to get assistance in applying for these funds. We complemented this tool with a multilingual, statewide outreach campaign that effectively reached traditional non-filers. We partnered with state agencies like the Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), who sent text messages and flyers to existing clients, and the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), who utilized its network of superintendents to disseminate information to public school students statewide. We mailed flyers to over 560,000 households that received Pandemic-EBT (P-EBT) and partnered with the Commonwealth to send texts in six languages to over 500,000 SNAP, TANF, and WIC recipients. We identified a dozen cities across Massachusetts with a high rate of non-filers and partnered with mayors in each city, hosting Facebook Live conversations and garnering local media attention. And we created a simple how-to YouTube video on applying for the Child Tax Credit through the federal government’s GetCTC.org tool, and we worked with local leaders and members of the press to share the video broadly, resulting in over 21,000 views.
ADOPTION:
From the launch of FindYourFunds.org in July 2021 through November of that year, the website was visited by over 376,000 people, with nearly 75,000 clicking through to apply for available funds. As a result, the number of Massachusetts children receiving Child Tax Credit payments increased during this time by $15,000, with every child in Massachusetts receiving an average of $242 per month. During this short period of time, $1.28 billion in federal funding was distributed to Massachusetts residents, with the rate increasing by an average of 4.4% each month since the launch of FindYourFunds. Additionally, thanks to the resources available on FindYourFunds and the YouTube training video, 2,605 new tax returns were filed on GetCTC.org during this time period, resulting in $10.9 million new federal dollars coming into Massachusetts. The FindYourFunds tool gained national attention and was highlighted by the White House in a press release and webinar as the gold standard for helping residents access the resources available to them.
FindYourFunds continues to be utilized each year, aiding households through the tax filing season and connecting Massachusetts residents with essential benefits. As of 2024, the website has been visited over 1.2 million times and has assisted over 500,000 MA individuals. We have since proudly transitioned stewardship of FindYourFunds to Children’s HealthWatch, one of the program’s initial partners, exemplifying our commitment to incubating transformative approaches for families.
PROBLEM:
In March 2020, when school buildings closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many students who relied on school meals were left without support. Weeks later, Massachusetts received approval from the federal government to provide families with funds through the USDA’s National School Lunch Program that traditionally fund in-school meals. The mechanism for providing these funds to families was called Pandemic-EBT (P-EBT), and it followed the same methodology as the traditional SNAP program. To cover missed school meals from March through June, students received $400 in funds on existing SNAP EBT cards or on new P-EBT cards. However, many students were unaware that this money was available to them, and many cards mailed out to students initially were not activated. And because this was a new program, there was no playbook for success.
PARTNERS:
We partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance (DTA), Project Bread, and the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute to develop a toolkit and playbook for ensuring every student in Massachusetts who received P-EBT funding knew how to utilize it.
SOLUTION:
Together, we created a website called MAP-EBT.org with information for families on accessing P-EBT and resources for city and community leaders to help them spread the word about these funds. We developed outreach materials, flyers, email templates, robocall scripts, and social media campaigns, and we shared these materials with far-reaching community groups. We collected polling data on food insecurity in a dozen target cities across Massachusetts and generated local and statewide media attention on both the problem and the opportunity provided by P-EBT funding. And we held webinars in multiple languages with mayors and nonprofit leaders to spread the word about how to access P-EBT.
ADOPTION:
By the end of 2020, 84% of Massachusetts P-EBT cards were activated – the highest of any state in the country – and more than $253 million in federal dollars was brought into Massachusetts through the P-EBT program. Leaders from other states reached out about how we were able to accomplish this, and we held trainings and adapted our materials for other states to replicate our success nationwide.
PROBLEM:
Approximately 50,000 young people across Massachusetts are engaged with the Department of Children and Families (DCF), and many of these children have experienced abuse, neglect, or significant family trauma. These feelings can be reignited when visiting with biological family members, which take place in one of dozens of DCF visitation spaces across the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, while the social workers at DCF do incredible work, the spaces that house them are outside their scope, and these spaces were not designed to ameliorate trauma. DCF buildings traditionally feel like sterile office spaces, with bland walls, fluorescent lighting, and uncomfortable furniture, with no attention paid to the impact of colors, artwork, and design choices.
PARTNERS:
We partnered with the Wonderfund, a nonprofit that supports all young people in Massachusetts engaged with DCF, to transform these spaces with trauma-informed design at the forefront.
SOLUTION:
We understood the impact that physical spaces have on children and families – and particularly those who have endured trauma – and we saw an opportunity to create family-friendly spaces that could reduce stress, provide natural opportunities for bonding, and rewrite the script for how families felt walking into a DCF office. Together, we set out to renovate every DCF building in Massachusetts, focusing on making simple, trauma-informed design choices, including soft lighting and fabrics, soothing wall colors, and calming visual art. We promote a sense of safety by avoiding clutter and creating clear sight lines. We include age-appropriate games and books for natural opportunities for families to play and read together. And we create sensory-friendly rooms for children with special needs. We execute these transformations ourselves, supported by incredible volunteers from companies and colleges throughout Massachusetts. From sourcing couches that are comfortable and easily cleanable, to framing and hanging wall art, to assembling baby rockers and bookshelves, our teams joyfully transform these rooms in just a few hours at a time.
ADOPTION:
In the summer of 2024, we completed our final renovation, reshaping all 154 family visitation rooms in 17 DCF sites across Massachusetts. Demonstrating the impact of trauma-informed design, DCF social workers report that families entering these transformed spaces feel considered, valued, and treated with dignity. And as for the children, their anxiety levels are noticeably down as they enter rooms that are quite literally designed for them, distracted and delighted by the cozy furniture, eye-level art, and sensory toys. This initiative has proven so successful that it has inspired systemic change in the way DCF will plan its new leases going forward, implementing trauma-informed design principles whenever they begin a new build-out. By using money already in the agency’s facilities and procurement budgets, DCF is leading the way in proving that government agencies can make a meaningful difference in the experience of the people they serve – without having to seek additional funding.
PROBLEM:
In the summer of 2022, students were completing their first fully in-person school year after the disruptions from the pandemic, and a concerning trend was emerging: students were increasingly struggling with mental health issues and this was leading to behavioral issues in the classroom. The isolation of the pandemic and the associated increase in online activity exacerbated feelings of depression and anxiety, and educators were themselves struggling with how to simultaneously support students and be mindful of their own worsening mental health.
PARTNERS:
In a series of focus groups with school leaders, counselors, and teachers, it became clear that educators were looking for proven and easy-to-implement strategies to build happy and resilient classrooms. We partnered with John Crocker at the Massachusetts School Mental Health Consortium (MASMHC) and psychiatrists at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) to help provide those strategies. As this community grew, we also welcomed the Teacher Collaborative as a critical partner in this effort.
SOLUTION:
Together, we planned a free summer webinar series on Cognitive Behavioral Tools (CBT) for the classroom, offering expert advice to educators on plug-and-play tools to support student mental health in the next school year. Hundreds of educators across the state attended these sessions, and we heard a desire for continued engagement on this topic. In response, we formed the “Teach for Wellness” community, a growing community of curious educators seeking and sharing proven strategies for supporting resilient students.
ADOPTION:
The “Teach For Wellness” community continued to expand over the following year with a monthly newsletter containing wellness tips for educators, and by the end of the 2022-2023 school year there were over 500 educators engaged regularly with experts on a variety of mental health topics. A research article studying our CBT webinar found an increase in attendees’ knowledge and comfort using CBT skills in the classroom. In the summer of 2023, in response to increasing demand, we held another free webinar on bringing trauma-informed teaching strategies into classrooms. That fall, stewardship of Teach For Wellness was transitioned to the Teacher Collaborative, empowering educators to build resilient and healthy classrooms for themselves and their students.
PROBLEM:
The mental health crisis is worsening among teens, and emerging research increasingly points to social media as a key driver. In particular, certain features such as the “like” and “share” buttons increase negative social comparisons and contribute to anxiety, depression, and a negative self-image. Parents have always had to keep teens safe through adolescence, and they are adept at talking to their kids about dangers like drugs and alcohol. However, social media presents a new problem, with new information coming every day, and parents are struggling to keep pace.
PARTNERS:
We consulted with pediatricians, psychiatrists, researchers, school leaders, and social media advocates to better understand the existing and emerging research and tools available for parents and educators. We also closely partnered with key figures in the social media and youth mental health space, including Dr. Stuart Ablon, Child and Adolescent Psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Founder of Think:Kids, Dr. Jill Walsh, a researcher and Professor at Boston University and Founder of Digital Aged, and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.
SOLUTION:
We created “Your Brain on Social Media,” (YBOSM), an online resource designed to provide caregivers and educators and caregivers with comprehensive, up-to-date research, expertise advice, and guidance to effectively navigate the complexities of parenting and educating in the era of social media. Together with Dr. Ablon, we developed “How to Talk to Your Kids About Social Media”, a step-by-step video series utilizing his Collaborative Problem Solving® (CPS) approach to help parents engage in constructive conversations with their children about social media. In 2024, we partnered with Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office to develop actionable resources that enable educators, schools and communities to take a community-centered approach to implementing effective cell phone and social media policies and foster digital literacy and responsible technology use.
ADOPTION:
Your Brain on Social Media was launched in fall 2023, and since then, the website receives thousands of visitors each month and has been highlighted in regional and national media coverage. Your Brain on Social Media is a trusted source among caregivers and educators to receive expert guidance.
Research & Community Support
We have been fortunate to support and partner with amazing, innovative organizations making a difference for families and communities across Massachusetts.
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Achilles
An international organization serving athletes with disabilities, we relaunched the Boston branch of Achilles 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.
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Boston Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SpEdPAC)
We built SpEdPAC a new website to assist parents and advocates in navigating the school district for students with disabilities.
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Bridge Over Troubled Waters
A social services organization in Boston supporting homeless, runaway, and at-risk youth, we support Bridge Over Troubled Waters and helped them provide new program space at Emerson College to house 20 young people in need of a safe and welcoming environment.
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Cape Abilities
We provided support and guidance to help Cape Abilities grow their farm business and further their mission of providing residential, therapeutic, social, and employment support to people with disabilities while expanding their ability to provide fresh fruit, vegetables, and other staples to Cape Cod families and visitors.
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EdNavigator
We worked with EdNavigator 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 advisors able to help them choose schools, explore special education and multilingual learning opportunities, and address academic concerns.
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Fresh Truck
We supported the launch and growth of Fresh Truck's grocery delivery service, rethinking the grocery store model to bring healthy food directly to those who need it most. We also supported the development of Fresh Connect, a platform that enables healthcare providers to prescribe food as medicine.
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Harvard Graduate School of Education
We supported HGSE's “Making Caring Common” initiative and launched the “Caring Community Project” in Boston Public Schools, an effort to help students identify supportive adults in their lives and to foster new and productive student-adult connections.
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Heading Home
We supported Heading Home's efforts to expand social-emotional and literacy growth opportunities for 3-4 year-olds.
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Inner Explorer
We conducted a pilot of Inner Explorer's audio-guided mindfulness platform with K2-8th grade students in eight Boston Public Schools. Over 80 percent of participating educators reported social-emotional improvement in their students after using this platform.
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InnerCity Weightlifting
An organization focused on addressing systemic racism and mass incarceration through a constructive fitness training community, we supported InnerCity Weightlifting with the opening of a new Cambridge studio and provided strategic guidance to help them grow their team.
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MassINC Polling Group
We support an ongoing tracking poll of the Boston Public School community three times each year, collecting valuable data on opinions about the district’s initiatives, responses to pressing issues, and communication with parents and guardians.
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MIT Media Lab
We are working with Roz Picard, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group, on the development of a new platform to provide mental health resources and a communal forum for youth in foster care.
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Salesian Club
We collaborated with the Salesian Club in East Boston on construction of a new, modern kitchen space that now serves fresh, healthy, locally-sourced dinners to 120 kids every day.
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The Teacher Collaborative
We partnered with the Teacher Collaborative to develop the “Passion to Teach” program, supporting educators in developing their personal passions into classroom learning experiences.
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UMass Boston
Our team worked with UMass Boston to develop a new Early College model to enable Boston Public School students to receive up to 30 college credits prior to graduation.
