When Food Becomes Part of the Care Plan

At the DC Primary Care Association’s milestone conference, WANDA Founder Tambra Raye Stevenson will moderate a Food Is Medicine conversation about what it takes to move from promising pilots to durable community health infrastructure and WANDA will exhibit its own work connecting maternal health, nutrition, culture, and community power.

For all the attention Food Is Medicine has received in recent years, the hardest work has never been proving that food affects health. Communities have known that for generations.

The harder question is what happens when health systems decide to act on that knowledge.

Who screens for nutrition insecurity? Who follows up after the referral? Who pays the farmer or community organization? Who coordinates between clinics and food providers? What information makes it back into the patient record? What happens when grant funding ends? And perhaps most importantly, can a Food Is Medicine program actually fit the cultural, economic, and everyday realities of the people it is supposed to serve?

Those are some of the questions WANDA will bring to the DC Primary Care Association’s 30th Anniversary Annual Conference on October 26, 2026, at the Washington Marriott Capitol Hill, where Founder and CEO Tambra Raye Stevenson will moderate a breakout conversation on Food Is Medicine and WANDA will exhibit its work throughout the conference. DCPCA is marking three decades of work under the theme “30 Years of Collective Action: Centering Community Health, Power, and Partnership.” Its anniversary program will bring together health-center leaders, clinicians, policymakers, community organizations, and other partners for discussions spanning Food Is Medicine, value-based care, digital health, cybersecurity, policy, storytelling, and community-driven partnerships. 

For WANDA, the invitation feels especially appropriate. The organization has spent years arguing that Food Is Medicine will reach its greatest potential only when the movement treats food not simply as a clinical intervention, but as part of a larger system encompassing culture, agriculture, maternal health, communication, community organizations, and the economic infrastructure required to make healthier choices possible.

“DCPCA is pleased to welcome Tambra Raye Stevenson, founder and CEO of WANDA, to moderate our Food Is Medicine breakout session. Tambra brings a powerful combination of public health expertise, community-rooted leadership, and a bold vision for moving Food Is Medicine from promising pilots toward culturally responsive, sustainable health care infrastructure.” — David Poms, DC Primary Care Association

Community Health Centers Are Already Where Food and Health Meet

If Food Is Medicine is going to become part of routine care in Washington, community health centers will be central to that transition. DCPCA reports that Washington’s community health centers collectively operate more than 60 care-delivery sites and serve approximately 200,000 people in the District and Maryland each year. These organizations provide far more than traditional primary care. Their services can include behavioral health, dental care, prenatal and pediatric care, chronic-disease management, case management, and other supports built around the realities of the communities they serve. 

That matters because nutrition insecurity rarely arrives at the clinic alone.

A patient managing diabetes may also be navigating rent, transportation, caregiving, work schedules, and grocery prices. A pregnant woman may receive clinically sound nutrition guidance but still face questions about affordability, culturally familiar food, cooking facilities, or whether the foods being recommended are available near her home. A clinician can identify the need, but identification is only one step in a much longer chain.

Community health centers have always had to understand that health is produced both inside and outside the exam room. Bread for the City, for example, combines medical care with food and social services, while Community of Hope provides medical care alongside housing and other wraparound supports. DCPCA itself works across the city's safety-net infrastructure through initiatives such as DC PACT, which connects community health centers, hospitals, managed-care organizations, social-service providers, and District agencies around the social conditions that influence health. 

In many ways, then, Food Is Medicine is not introducing community health centers to the idea that food matters. It is asking how the health system can build the financing, data, clinical workflows, partnerships, procurement relationships, and accountability needed to treat nutrition as part of care with the same seriousness afforded other interventions.

The Question Is No Longer Whether Food Is Medicine

Stevenson has increasingly challenged audiences to move past the slogan itself. Her question is: Whose food gets called medicine, whose knowledge counts, and who benefits when health care begins investing in food?

WANDA’s own Food Is Medicine work has centered Black maternal and family health, including its NOURISH initiative with mothers, doulas, birth workers, chefs, and nutrition professionals. The premise is that a culturally responsive nutrition intervention cannot simply begin with a prescription and end with a produce box. It has to account for trust, family foodways, communication, community-based expertise, and the realities surrounding the person receiving care.

Stevenson has previously described Food Is Medicine as both a clinical strategy and a nutrition-equity strategy, arguing that community organizations should be treated as partners in implementation rather than merely referral destinations. 

“The next phase of Food Is Medicine in Washington cannot be another collection of good pilots that disappear when the grant ends,” Stevenson said. “We have an opportunity to build an ecosystem where community health centers can identify nutrition needs, make meaningful referrals, work with trusted community organizations and local food providers, and know how that intervention connects back to health. The question is how we build the infrastructure and whether we build it with communities rather than simply for them.”

A Panel Designed to Get Past the Success Stories

The session Stevenson will moderate is designed less as a parade of organizational accomplishments and more as a working conversation among practitioners navigating different parts of DC’s Food Is Medicine ecosystem.

Panelists Ona Balkus, Legislative Director of DC Councilmember Henderson, Raisa Wells of Food and Friends, and Jaren Hill Lockridge, Chair of Ward 8 Health Council will each begin with a concise introduction to their work and the particular strength they bring to Food Is Medicine. From there, Stevenson will guide the conversation toward what tends to receive less attention once a successful pilot has been announced: the infrastructure gaps that make programs difficult to sustain, the relationships between health care and local food systems, the financing required for scale, the role of public policy, and the practical opportunities for health centers, community organizations, researchers, and residents to participate.

The premise is simple: If each person in the room holds one piece of the solution, what would it take to assemble those pieces into a functioning system?

The conversation is expected to draw from experience in Washington and the surrounding region, including lessons about cost, funding, maternal health, food-system infrastructure, community investment, and the relationship between public agencies, health providers, and community organizations.

That cross-sector focus reflects the conference's larger emphasis on collective action. DCPCA’s own work has increasingly focused on building coordinated systems rather than isolated services, including the DC Connected Care Network, a clinically integrated network involving seven federally qualified health centers.  Food Is Medicine will require that same instinct toward coordination.

The Missing Middle Between the Prescription and the Plate

One of the tensions Stevenson hopes to surface is what might be called the “missing middle” of Food Is Medicine. The clinical intervention often receives the most attention. A patient is screened, diagnosed, referred, or prescribed. But between that clinical decision and a meal reaching someone's table lies an entire ecosystem.

There are growers and distributors. Community-based organizations and care navigators. Dietitians and community health workers. Technology systems. Eligibility requirements. Procurement contracts. Delivery routes. Kitchens. Funding streams. Data-sharing rules. Evaluation. And families who must decide whether the food provided is something they actually know how or want to eat.

When any one part of that chain fails, the intervention can fail with it. This is where DC’s community health centers may have a distinctive advantage. Their long-standing relationships with patients and neighborhoods give them an understanding of needs that cannot be captured by claims data alone. Yet relationship-based care cannot substitute for sustainable financing and infrastructure.

DCPCA’s own forthcoming work on the future of primary care has emphasized the mismatch between primary care's role and the resources devoted to it. The organization recently noted that primary care accounts for a large share of patient visits while receiving a relatively small share of health spending, a tension that becomes relevant whenever clinics are asked to take on additional responsibilities without corresponding investment. 

Food Is Medicine cannot become one more worthy expectation layered onto under-resourced primary care.

What Would It Mean to Build Food Is Medicine Into the Health System?

For WANDA, success would not mean every health center running an identical program. DCs communities are too different for that, and so are patients. Instead, an effective citywide infrastructure might make it easier for a health center to identify nutrition insecurity, connect a patient with the appropriate intervention, coordinate with trusted food and community partners, document what happened, evaluate outcomes, and finance that work without rebuilding the system from scratch every time a new grant becomes available.

• It could also mean expanding what counts as infrastructure.

• Local farmers are infrastructure.

• Doulas and community health workers are infrastructure.

• Culturally knowledgeable nutrition professionals are infrastructure.

• Community-based organizations with years of neighborhood trust are infrastructure.

• Food distribution and cold storage are infrastructure.

• Data systems are infrastructure.

• And trust itself is infrastructure.

  
  

WANDA believes the city will struggle to scale Food Is Medicine if it invests heavily in the intervention while underinvesting in the people and institutions required to deliver it.

That is particularly consequential in maternal and child health, where food recommendations intersect with pregnancy, breastfeeding, infant feeding, household budgets, caregiving responsibilities, cultural traditions, and the health of more than one generation.

The Next Question Is Sustainability

There is a reason the DCPCA session is asking speakers not simply what works, but what they wish were easier. Food Is Medicine has reached a stage where the movement has accumulated enough promising projects to ask harder questions about permanence.

• What happens when philanthropy leaves?

• Which interventions belong within health care payment?

• Which responsibilities belong to thegovernment?

• Where should community organizations lead?

• How should health care dollars strengthen rather than bypass local food infrastructure?

• What outcomes matter to clinicians, payers, community organizations, and patients and are they the same outcomes?

  
  

These are not reasons to slow the movement down. They are signs that Food Is Medicine is maturing. The field is moving from Can we do this? toward How do we make this ordinary? That second question is considerably harder.

WANDA Will Bring the Community Table to the Exhibit Hall

WANDA will also exhibit during the 30th Anniversary Conference, giving attendees another opportunity to explore the organization’s work at the intersection of nutrition, public health, food systems, maternal health, communication, and workforce development.

The exhibit will offer a window into the broader ecosystem WANDA is building from its maternal Food Is Medicine work and culturally grounded nutrition education to its efforts to train women and girls to become leaders across food, agriculture, nutrition, and health.

That presence matters because one of WANDA’s central arguments is that the workforce question cannot be separated from the Food Is Medicine question.

Scaling nutrition interventions will require more than additional food. It will require people capable of delivering, interpreting, communicating, evaluating, and continually improving those interventions. And those people should reflect the communities being served.

Thirty Years of Primary Care and the Question of What Comes Next

DCPCA was founded in 1996, making this year's conference both celebration and inflection point. The anniversary program will feature keynote speaker Dr. Maranda C. Ward of George Washington University, alongside sessions exploring the systems shaping community health in Washington. 

For Food Is Medicine, the timing feels fitting. The movement has spent years demonstrating promise. Washington now has an opportunity to ask what comes after promise.

• Can food interventions become integrated into primary care without becoming overly medicalized?

• Can health care investment strengthen local growers and community organizations rather than merely creating new vendors?

• Can data systems support coordination without reducing people to risk scores?

• Can culturally responsive care become part of infrastructure instead of an optional feature?

  
  

And can DC build a Food Is Medicine ecosystem sturdy enough that families do not experience it as another temporary program? Those are not questions one organization can answer. Which is exactly why WANDA is looking forward to moderating the table.

“We have many of the ingredients in Washington already,” Stevenson said. “We have extraordinary community health centers, food system organizations, public agencies, researchers, farmers, health professionals, and residents with lived expertise. The opportunity now is alignment. Food Is Medicine becomes transformative when we stop thinking only about individual programs and start asking how all of these assets can function as a system.”

Join WANDA at DCPCA’s 30th Anniversary Conference

The DC Primary Care Association 30th Anniversary Annual Conference — “30 Years of Collective Action: Centering Community Health, Power, and Partnership” will take place Monday, October 26, 2026, at the Washington Marriott Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. WANDA will participate as both an exhibitor and contributor to the Food Is Medicine breakout session moderated by Tambra Raye Stevenson. 

Clinicians, community health-center professionals, community organizations, public-health practitioners, researchers, advocates, and others interested in the future of primary care in Washington can find conference updates and registration information through the DC Primary Care Association.

The future of Food Is Medicine will not be determined by whether Washington can launch another innovative pilot. It will be determined by whether we can build the relationships, workforce, financing, cultural trust, food infrastructure, and primary-care systems capable of keeping the work going after the pilot is over.

The prescription may begin in the clinic. The infrastructure has to reach much farther.