Dear Friends and Colleagues,

2025 has been a landmark year for The Kraft Center! We launched an exciting new portfolio of initiatives while sustaining and expanding the impact of our ongoing programming. We are deeply grateful for our staff, partners, and collaborators who helped make this year such a success!

A major milestone of the year was the launch of the inaugural Kraft Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Community Health, which recognizes transformative organizations and innovations improving health outcomes and offering scalable models for community impact. We also celebrated local community health leaders and their organizations with the Kraft Center Community Health Champion Awards.

The Kraft Center remains equally committed to advancing our own innovative programs. Our Community Care in Reach® mobile addiction model continues to serve some of the most vulnerable residents across the Commonwealth; the DREAMH (Driving Equity and Maternal Health) initiative's Mobile Postpartum Care Unit brings care directly to new parents and pregnant people in Greater Boston; and the Mass General Brigham Community Care Van fleet continues to bring services outside the hospital walls to provide support for heart disease, substance use disorder, and social risk mitigation.

As we look forward to 2026, we are excited to continue bringing innovative solutions and programming to improve community health in Greater Boston and beyond.

As always, we are incredibly grateful to Mr. Robert K. Kraft and the Kraft Family for their steadfast support that makes this work possible. We wish everyone a healthy, safe, and wonderful New Year!

Best wishes,

Elsie Taveras, MD, MPH

Executive Director, Kraft Center for Community Health

Chief Community Health & Health Equity Officer, Mass General Brigham

Launched in 2025, the Kraft Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Community Health recognizes and celebrates transformative organizations making measurable impacts on community health. The Prize reflects the Center’s mission to elevate other innovators that are working creatively and effectively to tackle some of the most pressing issues impacting community health, namely cancer, heart disease, maternal health, and substance use disorder.

The Prize awards one exceptional program or innovation $100,000 and the opportunity to present at the Mass General Brigham World Medical Innovation Forum (WMIF), as well as tailored support and mentorship through the Mass General Brigham Innovation ecosystem. Two finalists are also awarded $10,000 and an invitation to the WMIF.

In this inaugural year, we had an impressive group of nearly 150 applicants from across the United States applying innovative solutions for community health. In the end there was one applicant who stood out from the rest: ThriveLink, a telephonic AI enrollment solution that empowers families to verbally complete and submit applications for safety-net programs like health insurance, food stamps and utility assistance.

In addition to ThriveLink being selected as the winner of the Kraft Prize, two organizations were selected as finalists: Mae, a digital health platform working to improve maternal health outcomes and Sober Sidekick, a peer-led application that aims to decrease the rate of relapses among individuals seeking treatment for substance use. Both received $10,000 to further their efforts.

The Kraft Center participated in two panels at the 2025 World Medical Innovation Forum to discuss innovations in community health. On Monday September 15, our Founder, Robert Kraft, introduced a panel discussion moderated by Jonathan Kraft that focused on the power of technology and innovation to transform the landscape of community health. The panel showcased the work of the inaugural Kraft Prize Winner, ThriveLink / Kwamane Liddell, and featured our Executive Director, Dr. Elsie Taveras, alongside investor and Co-Founder and CEO of WellWithAll, Demond Martin, and Senior Partner at Bain & Company, Eric Berger. Watch a full video of Panel I: Catalyzing Innovative Solutions to Community Health Problems (below).

On Tuesday September 16, Dr. Taveras, moderated a conversation on developing creative solutions to priority health challenges in communities, which included ThriveLink / Kwamane Liddell, and Kraft Prize finalists Sober Sidekick / Chris Thompson, Mae / Alisha Lalani, as well as Dr. Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang, a thoracic surgeon and Founding Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence & Innovation Research at Mass General Brigham. Watch a full video of Panel II: Tackling High Priority Health Challenges in Our Communities (below).

Bringing together nearly 120 leaders from Mass General Brigham (MGB), local communities, and the business, biotech, and philanthropy worlds, the celebratory event honored the six inaugural recipients of the Kraft Center Community Health Champions Awards. Supported by M&T Bank, the awards were presented to four MGB employees and two local organizations for their extraordinary work in improving community health outcomes. The following organizations and individuals were recognized:

• Women Encouraging Empowerment Inc., empowers immigrant and refugee women and their families to achieve economic independence and access opportunities through education, leadership development, community organizing, and service delivery.
• Healthy Streets Outreach Program, provides overdose education and naloxone distribution for people with substance use disorder.
• Claudine Bruff-Lopes, RN, BSN, MHA, a compassionate nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and dedicated healthcare advocate.
• Joyce P. Clark, a family partner at the Brigham with a strong history of civic engagement.
• Joshua Abrams, JD, associate general counsel at MGB who leads the Patient Care Team, and provides advice and counsel regarding legal issues that relate to clinical and community care.
• Chi-Fu Jeffrey Yang, MD, a thoracic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital who started the American Lung Cancer Screening Initiative, a non-profit that has worked with communities across 50 states to highlight the importance of lung cancer screening.

And though their specific areas of focus differ, all six honorees share a singular goal — to ensure residents of the communities they serve have excellent access to the care and resources they need.

The Community Care in Reach® (CCiR) mobile addiction services program, continued to provide essential services at five sites across the Commonwealth. CCiR, first launched in Boston in January 2018, is a public/private partnership with Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) serving communities across Massachusetts including Boston, Brockton, Springfield, Worcester, and Lowell. The program brings clinical care and harm reduction services to areas with persistently high overdose rates, prioritizing individuals facing barriers to care in traditional settings at greatest risk for near-term death from overdose.

Lowell Community Health Center became the most recent addition to the CCiR team last year, and its mobile initiative officially launched in early 2025! Their mobile unit was generously donated by Robert K. Kraft and Family and became the fifth vehicle in the CCiR fleet.

In 2025, the CCiR sites had 19,551 total encounters, 8,826 harm reduction encounters, 5,942 clinical encounters, 894 unique individuals received clinical care, and 234 unique individuals received buprenorphine treatment. Participating sites include Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program & the Boston Public Health Commission's AHOPE team in Boston; the Brockton Neighborhood Health Center in Brockton; Tapestry in Western Massachusetts, including Springfield and Holyoke; UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester; and Lowell Community Health Center in Lowell.

With a grant from MDPH, the Kraft Center continues to provide technical assistance and evaluation to the state-funded sites, and partners with The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University for program evaluation. The Center meets monthly with the program partners, covering topics including safety during outreach, vehicle maintenance, licensure & compliance, and the impact of recent legal rulings and community ordinances on the provision of services to people experiencing homelessness.

On April 11, The Kraft Center for Community Health hosted its second annual Virtual Mobile Addiction Services Conference in collaboration with RIZE Massachusetts. The goal of the conference is to support programs across the country to mobilize clinical care and harm reduction services for people living with addiction. This year's conference covered topics including safety & de-escalation in a mobile setting, the role of mobile programs in combatting stigma around addiction, and how to navigate providing addiction care in our evolving political and social landscape. To see the course sessions, click HERE. Our next conference is set to take place in 2026.

Through a generous gift from Jill and Michael Stansky, The Kraft Center, alongside partners at Mass General Program in Substance Use & Addiction Services (PSAS) are providing 75 to 100 housing scholarships to people with substance use disorder (SUD) . Housing scholarships for people with SUD experiencing homelessness are a meaningful way to address the upfront costs that housing often requires. Many people are unable to afford the first 2-3 months rent required by sober homes or first and last month’s rent required by rental properties, and therefore miss out on critical opportunities to secure stable housing. Once stably housed, people are better able to engage in their medical care and find a job to support housing costs in an ongoing way.

It was a busy year for our Driving Equity and Maternal Health (DREAMH) initiative, which aims to reduce negative maternal health outcomes for pregnant and new parents. The program aims to limited access to convenient and culturally appropriate care, which is a major driver of negative outcomes. DREAMH uses multiple strategies including mobile care for postpartum patients and expanded doula access through the Mass General Brigham Birth Partners program. Patients receive curbside care for up to six months postpartum with the care team providing services focused on cardiometabolic health and mental health support, among others.

The team was featured in a TODAY segment, highlighting the important work of this great team. See the full TODAY story here: How Mobile Care Vans Help Moms Get the Healthcare They Need

Many individuals face barriers to accessing traditional healthcare, and the Mass General Brigham (MGB) Community Care Vans aim to make care more accessible to communities throughout Greater Boston. Among the services provided by the Department of Public Health-licensed clinics include care for cardiometabolic disease, substance use disorder, social risk mitigation, vaccinations, and health education. By partnering with local organizations around Chelsea, Everett, Lynn, and Boston neighborhoods including Mattapan, we're able to provide wraparound services supporting people with essential care and connecting them to primary care as needed.

In 2025, the Kraft Center-led MGB Community Care Van provided 1,295 blood pressure screenings, 448 A1C tests, 48 clinical visits focused on substance use disorder care, over 600 visits for substance use disorder harm reduction, and 39 colon cancer screening tests.

Photo courtesy of Boys and Girls Clubs of Boston and Reedbarkerco

The Community Care Vans were once again on hand for the 6th Annual Deatrich Wise Block Party to provide care, screening, and navigation to community members. At the Josh Kraft Mattapan Teen Center, the team met with community members seeking blood pressure checks and diabetes screenings, share information on flu and COVID vaccines, and provide guidance on cancer screening. The team was joined by our colleagues from Massachusetts Eye and Ear, who shared hearing and vision health education, and connected with HEART of Mattapan and the Boston Medical Center Curbside Care Van team, who were there highlighting maternal health services. 

The strong interest in heart health and chronic disease prevention demonstrates how far the Community Care Van program has come from their vaccine clinic roots, establishing themselves as trusted partners delivering essential, community-based care.

HEART of Communities seeks to improve cardiometabolic health among at-risk patients in Mattapan with hypertension and diabetes through clinical management, social risk navigation, and integrated behavioral health and wellness support. A joint effort by Mass General Brigham, Boston Medical Center, and Mattapan Community Health Center, the intensive 6-month program empowers Mattapan residents to work with healthcare providers to build personalized support structures that enhance their overall health and well-being through the following strategies:

• Clinical management delivered by a team of specialized clinicians
• Group support, including being paired with a Community Wellness Advocate, providing knowledge and resources to empower disease management strategies
• Support for social risk factors including economic mobility, job placement, nutrition security, behavioral health care, and group programming

Launched in early 2025, the program has contacted over 1,100 eligible Mattapan residents and enrolled over 150 participants. Early results are already indicating successful blood pressure and diabetes control for the first cohort of program participants.

As a member of Mass-ACCERT, The Kraft Center, alongside partners from with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, partnered with six community health centers (CHCs) and planned for guided facilitation beginning in Fall 2025 to optimize workflows and use population management tools to improve breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screening and tobacco treatment.

The Mass-ACCERT team also hosted 4 Implementation Learning Community meetings with staff from community health centers across the state of Massachusetts on topics including lung cancer screening and tobacco cessation, obesity prevention, breast cancer screening, and patient navigation.

In December, America's Newsroom on Fox News did a special interview highlighting the generous and impactful work of Kraft Center founder Mr. Robert K. Kraft. The Kraft Center is featured as one of many highlights in his large portfolio of philanthropy. View the full clip above and the full story here.

In May 2025, Mayor Michelle Wu appointed Kraft Center executive director, Dr. Elsie Taveras, as the chairperson of the Boston Board of Health. Dr. Taveras served on the Board of Health since April 2023. View full press release here: New Appointments to Boston's Board of Health | Boston.gov

Directly informed by the 2025 Community Health Needs Assessments and by local health data of the conditions that continue to drive premature mortality and shorter life expectancy, Mass General Brigham (MGB) will be launching a Community Health Improvement Program that will embed community health specialists in MGB-served neighborhoods with high rates of heart disease, cancer, and unintentional overdoses. When fully launched, specialists will be trained to screen for heart disease and cancer risk, screen for substance use disorders, measure blood pressure and cholesterol, and guide community members to clinical and social services. Community health specialists will leverage our clinical-community partnerships, and work to improve access to care, strengthen care coordination, and create more consistent pathways to better health outcomes. We are grateful to Biogen for being an early supporter of this work as we plan for an early 2026 launch of the program.

We are pleased to welcome back Stephanie Martinez to The Kraft Center as a Project Specialist. Stephanie previously worked with the Center as a Clinical Research Coordinator for the Implementation Laboratory (I-Lab) within the Implementation Science Center for Cancer Control Equity (ISCCCE). She will split her effort between supporting the Kraft Prize programming and the HEART of Communities program. She graduated from Boston University with a Master of Public Health after previously receiving her Bachelor of Science in Health Science with a minor in Medical Anthropology. Welcome back, Stephanie!

§ Mass General Brigham: Mass General Brigham’s Kraft Center Announces the 2025 Kraft Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Community Health (Mass General Brigham, February 6, 2025)

§ Patriots owner Robert Kraft, Mass. General Brigham Announce $100K prize aimed at improving health (WCVB, February 6, 2025)

§ Mass General Brigham’s Kraft Center Announces the 2025 Kraft Prize for Excellence and Innovation in Community Health (WJTV, February 6, 2025)

§ New Appointments to Boston’s Board of Health (Boston.gov, March 17, 2025)

§ From clinics to the community, innovative healthcare ideas are needed more than ever (Op-ed, Becker’s Hospital Review, March 25, 2025)

§ Kraft Center Celebrates Two Milestone Programs (Mass General Giving, August 8, 2025)

§ Mass General Brigham and Patriots’ owner honor healthcare innovator (WCVB, September 16, 2025)

§ Mass General Brigham’s $100K bet on a health equity startup (Becker’s Hospital Review, September 16, 2025)

§ ThriveLink wins inaugural Mass General Brigham community health award (Bay State Banner, September 17, 2025)

§ How Mobile Care Vans Help Moms Get the Healthcare They Need (Today Show, October 24, 2025)

§ Bill Hemmer Interview with Robert Kraft (America's Newsroom, December 17, 2025)