Learning Resilience from Community

Emily Choto ’25 is working toward both Environmental Science and Politics majors at USF! Being a McCarthy Fellow in San Francisco, she has been able to experience public service in the Mission District. Working inside The Food as Medicine Collaborative is a coalition of community clinics, food nonprofits and businesses, and health care systems. Emily has been able to connect with patients through healthy food and group visits.

The Food as Medicine Collaborative (FAMC)  is working to bridge the gap between healthcare and food systems in an effort to address food security. FAMC hosts food pharmacies that provide patients suffering from chronic health conditions with nutritious foods rather than only drug prescriptions to help improve their overall quality of life as well as their health condition. 

Through this internship, I’ve been able to see not only the importance of physical accessibility to food but also access to nutritionally beneficial foods. FAMC gives such a unique opportunity to qualifying residents of San Francisco by emphasizing that chronic health conditions cannot be remedied solely through prescription drugs, and instead require a lifestyle change that many people do not have the means to implement. Being at the food pharmacies gave me the opportunity to connect with patients and hear about how the program is beneficial to them. Many of the patients have expressed how being given healthy foods and fresh produce feels more beneficial than just being consistently prescribed different medications.

I’ve been assisting at one of the food pharmacies in the Mission this semester. Because I am bilingual, I can communicate and connect with patients as most of them speak very little English. Many patients feel very comfortable communicating suggestions, ideas, or just general comments about what we do every week and we can almost always come up with a resolution or answer for them. The patients have taught me a lot about resilience. It is refreshing to see their positive attitudes toward their health, as each of them wants to lead healthier lives but maybe did not have the resources before the program. Their positive attitudes have become such an inspiration to me because I think as people get older there can be a tendency to have a defeatist attitude. The food pharmacy I have been working at conducts “group visits”, meaning that cooking demonstrations and nutrition education are all done in front of a group rather than in one-on-one sessions. These demonstrations have shown that along with their own personal resilience, they also are so kind and encouraging to one another. I believe the community support patients have demonstrated has had a major impact on the positive attitudes patients have. The reminder that they are not alone I believe plays a large role. When talking about lifestyle changes, many of the patients use “we” and acknowledge the difficult changes that need to be made but in such an encouraging manner to their peers. 

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