Thank you for all you do to help Ceres serve our community. I'm grateful to each and every donor, client, volunteer and well-wisher for partnering with me to help Ceres best serve our clients and the teens in our youth program. I want to share some important changes that will be happening at Ceres over the next several months.

I must start by acknowledging Margaret Howe, our Associate Director, who has made the decision to leave Ceres. It is a huge moment - and loss to all of us - to have Margaret stepping down from her leadership role here at Ceres. I'm deeply grateful for Margaret's partnership over the past nine years. She's helped me be a better leader in countless ways and it's hard for me to imagine Ceres without her passion for our community, her insight and her wisdom.  She has shaped Ceres in significant ways that will carry forward for years to come. Margaret was among the first five staff members that we hired in January 2009. She worked five hours a week as our first Volunteer Manager, then managed the Sebastopol program site, then Sonoma County programs until agreeing to step into her current role as our Associate Director.  Margaret hasn't yet decided what she'll pursue next, and she'll be staying with us to help hire and orient a new director of our programs. We will be planning a celebration for Margaret in April so that we can send her on to what is next for her with love and gratitude. Once we have a date, I'll let you know so you can join us.

You will notice a number of changes at Ceres in the near future. The goal of the changes we're making is to streamline our operations and refocus on our core programs in order to better serve our client and youth programs.

Ceres Café

After careful thought we have made the very difficult decision to close the Ceres Café and redeploy those resources and kitchen capacity towards the Meal Program. 

I firmly believe that opening the Café was the right thing to do, and that it has been a tremendous success. Cole Bendinelli, the Café Manager, along with our café staff and volunteers, have done a fantastic job creating a warm and welcoming place for the community to gather and enjoy delicious, healthy food. The Café has been an incredible opportunity for Ceres to spread its message, make new friends, support young people and so much more. Unfortunately we simply aren't in a financial position to keep doing everything we are doing - especially with the waiting list for our clients growing . Closing the Café will help us refocus on our core programs and free up resources we need to expand the number of clients we're able to serve county-wide. We will close the Café Friday March 9 and have a party for patrons and supporters on Tuesday March 13 from 11:30-1:30. Please join us.

Statewide Medically-Tailored Meal Pilot

As you may know, Ceres is part of a coalition of California meal providers participating in a groundbreaking study to look at how delivering meals designed for patients facing serious illness can both improve their health and reduce healthcare costs. The state-funded study will focus on Medi-Cal patients with Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) who are being released from the hospital. The intervention they'll receive from Ceres and our partners includes 90 days of 100% nutrition plus four visits with a registered dietician to learn about how to eat in a way that keeps them healthy. As you know, this is different from the service we provide our regular clients. A staff team has been working together since September to plan for a successful launch of the pilot without negatively impacting our existing meal program.

As part of this planning, we've thoroughly reviewed our menu and made some adjustments to make sure that all of our meals meet heart health requirements, and to add a greater variety of foods that are more familiar to our diverse clients. We're also adding new cooking shifts in Sebastopol, where we will be serving these clients, to make the additional dishes for them. We expect to enroll our first pilot clients in late March.

This is the first multi-agency study of the benefits of providing medically-tailored meals and nutritional education, and has the potential to make healthy food a prescribed part of the treatment plan for certain diseases. We're very excited about that potential, both because it is so in line with our mission, and because it has the potential to bolster the sustainability of Ceres, allowing us to serve more clients.

Adding pasture-raised beef to our menu

This week, we began incorporating meals featuring grass-fed, organic beef into our menu rotation. When consumed in small quantities as part of a whole foods diet, high-quality, sustainably-raised beef can be good for both people and the environment. We believe this change to our menus is an important step towards making our meals more familiar to people from a wider variety of backgrounds. As with all our meals featuring animal proteins, these new dishes will focus on larger amounts of vegetables and whole grains and a smaller portion of protein than is typical in the standard American diet. You can learn more about this change in this month's nutrition article (below).

I recognize that this is a moment of big change here at Ceres. I am deeply grateful to each of you for your commitment to our work. Please let me know if I can answer any questions for you.