Last year, the members of the Omidyar network community voted to grant $1,000 to the Grow Clinic at Boston Medical Center. Thank you. In addition to helping hundreds of children who suffer from malnutrition and Failure to Thrive, the community is also supporting a passionate leader on the issue of children's nutrition and hunger, Dr. Deborah Frank, founder of the Grow Clinic and the Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program.

Dr. Frank created Boston Medical Center’s Grow Clinic which has served as a national model for alleviating childhood hunger and poverty by linking medical treatment to other services that fall outside the traditional medical model, such as nutritional assessment, legal advocacy, home health education, and a therapeutic food pantry.

In an effort to solve the problem of childhood hunger on a much larger scale, Dr. Frank created the Children’s Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP), a national network of pediatricians and public health researchers which conducts pediatric research and policy analysis in order to inform policy decisions that prevent child hunger and promote children's health and development. C-SNAP is unique because it focuses on: · conducting original, clinical research on children 0-3 years old, · facilitating public policies that protect children’s health and development by providing evidence to policy-makers and advocates from front-line research in medical centers around the country, and; · identifying and providing medical care and other resource referrals for children at risk of hunger or suffering from nutritional deprivation.

C-SNAP’s powerful work sits at the intersection of research, patient care and outreach. The five C-SNAP sites are located at medical centers serving ethnically diverse, urban, predominantly low-income areas of Baltimore, Boston, Little Rock, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia. At each site, research assistants interview children’s caregivers during waiting periods in the emergency department or acute care clinic, and obtain additional data from the children’s medical records. In addition to gathering the data for C-SNAP’s policy analysis, the interview process identifies the children and families who need interventions and outreach services to prevent nutritional deprivation. If the children’s medical records show they are underweight or suffering from critical growth and development issues, C-SNAP outreach workers help connect children to appropriate medical care, sometimes through the on-site ‘Grow Clinic’. Each C-SNAP Site Director is also the Clinical Director of a multi-disciplinary “Grow Clinic”- a unique resource at each medical center where medical care, nutrition counseling, and social service outreach are available to babies and toddlers who suffer from growth or health problems associated with malnourishment.

Dr. Deborah Frank was invited by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to speak at the The National Summit on America’s Children which took place on Tuesday, May 22nd on Capitol Hill. The day-long session convened national experts and academics on recent scientific findings and how they relate to early childhood development - a first step in making certain that federal policies on children reflect the latest scientific developments. The attached C-SNAP report ‘Food Stamps as Medicine’ provides an example of the findings that Dr. Frank shared at the Summit. For more information on the Summit, please see <http://speaker.gov/issues?id=0033> And for further information on CSNAP, visit www.c-snap.org <http://www.c-snap.org>

Alix Carey Director of Family Philanthropy Boston Medical Center