CCB MEDIA PHOTO
Lisa Guyon from Cape Cod Healthcare talks about collaboration at the Falmouth Service Center’s Annual Meeting.
FALMOUTH – Collaboration was the theme at the Falmouth Service Center’s Annual Meeting this week and before the luncheon was over, all in attendance brainstormed on additional ways the center could add services by working with like-minded agencies.
The Falmouth Service Center’s annual meeting took place Wednesday at its headquarters on Gifford Street.
With shelves of hundreds of canned goods surrounding them, the attendees listened to the successful collaborations the Service Center has put in place already, leading to the agency’s new motto, “More Than A Food Pantry.”
Lisa Guyon, Director of Community Benefits at Cape Cod Healthcare, was the event’s guest speaker and she said the center is an example for nonprofits throughout the region on how to collaborate.
“The Falmouth Service Center is this local model that is really doing it right. They are providing integrated services to the community that makes it easier for people who need access to services to find them in one place. It’s a model that serves as an example to many organizations on the Cape,” she said.
Guyon, who works in the grant-giving part of the hospital system, said there are a number of models of collaboration.
“There is the co-located model, the coordinated model and integrated model and each of them provide a different way of providing services to people to lessen the need for them to go out into the community and find services from an array of different organizations,” she said.
One of the Falmouth Service Center’s programs that has received a grant from Cape Cod Healthcare is a new nutrition program called Foods to Encourage, which, Guyon said, “provides public health nurses, nutrition counseling and new access to fresh food all in one place on a weekly basis and we’ve seen incredible health outcomes from the participants who have been part of this program, both on reducing high blood pressure and reducing diabetes,” she said.
The program, she said, brings all the services to the client.
Guyon said, that helps the clients by “making them healthier through giving them onsite access to monitoring those two health issues, access to food and nutrition programs, and access to the actual food that they can use to make them healthier,” she said.
By LAURA M. RECKFORD, CapeCod.com News Editor
Speak Your Mind