If you asked people to describe the Healing Meals Community Project, you might get different answers. For families experiencing a health crisis, it is a lifeline of nutritious, medically tailored meals delivered with a personal note of support. For the high school students who prepare the food, and write the notes, it is a unique opportunity to serve others, while discovering the good in themselves. Perhaps the best way to describe Healing Meals is as an organization that leverages the powerful relationship between food, health, and community. 

“We want everyone who comes through our doors to feel better when they leave and bring that energy to the next person they come in contact with,” Sarah Leathers, the C.E.O. of Healing Meals, said at its annual fundraiser in June.  

According to the Healing Meals team, that positivity is baked into every meal they make; and, they say, their clients can taste it. As a healing protocol for patients dealing with a serious illness, the organization prepares and delivers meals to families in Connecticut’s Hartford, Middlesex, and Litchfield Counties. Eighty percent of those who receive the food are eligible to do so for free. All of it is organic, locally sourced, and nutritious, aimed at nourishing patients with medical conditions and/or limited diets.

Healing Meals is among a growing national community dedicated to “food as medicine,” meaning they advocate for food-based interventions in health care. Research shows that tailoring meals to meet a client’s specific medical diagnosis leads to positive outcomes in health and satisfaction for people with severe, complex, and/or chronic illnesses. But anyone who has been in the Healing Meals kitchen, or worked in the gardens, or delivered meals to families, knows that this work is not just about food. 

As part of its model, Healing Meals enlists teenage volunteers who show up daily, put their phones aside, and help grow, cook and prepare the food under the supervision of a chef and other adult mentors. Part experiential learning, part youth empowerment, the program lets students learn about the relationship between food and health, become an integral part of a kitchen crew, and, often, gain meaning, agency and belonging.  

“From the moment I walked in, I felt instantly welcomed,” said Ben, a rising high school senior who is interning at Healing Meals this summer. “All of the other volunteers were just incredibly helpful to me. It was nothing I had really felt before.”

Since its founding in 2016, Healing Meals has engaged 700 youth volunteers, the majority of whom stay beyond their first experience. Leathers said while the organization’s dual mission – supporting clients and students alike -- can be challenging for donors to categorize, the success of the youth development program has taught her that one purpose often serves another. At a time when 40 percent of high schoolers report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, Healing Meals is becoming a model for a different kind of youth volunteerism, where the kids that are helping others may be getting far more in return.  

Organic Roots

The Healing Meals story began in California, where Leathers’ sister, Cathryn Couch, was running a similar organization called Ceres Community Project. Now serving more than 2,500 clients throughout Northern California, Ceres also has a youth development component, though Couch said its inclusion was somewhat serendipitous.  

As a well-known caterer in the Bay Area, Couch was asked by a friend to give her daughter a volunteer job for the summer. At the time, she was helping a woman undergoing cancer treatment with medically tailored meals for herself and her family. Realizing the growing need for this kind of support within her community — and witnessing the empathy and confidence her young intern was gaining — Couch put it all together, gave up her successful catering business, and launched Ceres. 

“It addressed so many needs in the community and so many things I care deeply about,” she wrote in her origin story on the organization’s web site. “Young people would learn to cook. People who needed healing food would have it. We would help teach people about the link between what we eat and our health. And we’d help restore the idea of caring for our neighbors, something that has been lost between my parent’s generation and my own.”

Leathers had long hoped to launch something similar in Connecticut, where the sisters were raised. Having experienced a personal health crisis in 2011, she began studying the link between nutrition and health and the relationship between the mind, body and spirit. But she had also been a tutor to students with disabilities and a job coach to young people, including boys who hadn’t finished high school and were preparing to enter the construction field. Leathers, who is an engineer by training, built the Healing Meals model with these experiences as scaffolding.

“No matter where you come from or what your story is, every young person deserves to feel seen, valued, and supported,” she said. “We all need someone who genuinely cares and who helps us grow with accountability and love.”

The opportunity to mentor youth volunteers as part of the food-as-medicine model was particularly appealing to Leathers’ co-founder, Ellen Palmer. A certified holistic health and life coach, Palmer had worked with teenagers and young adults with stress and anxiety. Yes, the students would provide a valuable service, but they would also have an opportunity to contribute to something meaningful, away from the pressure of college prep and social media.

“Young people need a place to go where they can feel worthy and learn about themselves,” said Palmer, who was with the organization until 2023.

In November 2015, Leathers and Palmer went to California with their other two co-founders Ellen Deutsch and Emily Safino to complete the Ceres affiliate training course. They launched the Healing Meals Community Project from a dining room table and used a borrowed kitchen for the first year. From an event posted on Facebook, they got a handful of adult volunteers, their first four clients and $50,000 in initial funding. That funding has grown to over $1.4 million per year from people and organizations who have touched, or are touched by, the Healing Meals mission.

"The objective at Healing Meals is to have youth lean into the positive belief that we have about them: 'You are amazing. You are capable. You can’t mess this up. We love you.'"

Cook. Breathe. Grow.

Nine years and more than 218,000 meals later, Healing Meals now has an industrial kitchen inside what was a former golf club, sitting at the bottom of a low mountain range in Simsbury, Conn. There are organic gardens and free-range chickens out on the grounds. The students come in just after school and grab their aprons. But before they get to work preparing whatever meal the chef has planned for the day, they enter a circle, hear from a recent client, and giggle through the icebreaker.

Questions in circle range from “What animal would you want to be?” to “What does Healing Meals mean to you?” Most of the kids start out as strangers, some frightened to socialize beyond screens and across differences. But Palmer said the immediacy of the task before them accelerates a special connection.

“There’s a level setting that goes on in the Healing Meals kitchen,” she said.  “We’re all in it together. Someone is chopping vegetables. Someone is mopping the floor. Someone is working on a recipe. Somebody else is taking out the garbage.” 

Executive Chef Joe Bucholz with student volunteers. Via Healing Meals.

Joe Bucholz is Healing Meals’ executive chef.  He said there are major differences between his current workplace and the upscale restaurant kitchen he used to run, particularly around command and control. “I do a lot of supervising, a lot of coaching, a lot of connecting,” he said. “But I’m not actually cooking the food.”  He said he is always surprised when he hears parents say, “In our house, you are famous.”

At Healing Meals, the students are involved in food and nutrition in a number of ways. Their shifts often begin with a lesson about what they are preparing, where it is sourced, why it is being used. They are invited to eat what they cook and provide suggestions on how it can be improved or scaled. The adults in the room are there to coax the learning, whether by teaching the volunteers how to gather herbs or asking them to improvise when they’ve run out of cilantro. While there are many important protocols to follow, and safety guardrails strongly enforced, the message the youth receive is “We trust you.”

“The objective at Healing Meals is to have youth lean into the positive belief that we have about them,” said Palmer. “'You are amazing. You are capable. You can’t mess this up. We love you.'”

After preparing and packaging meals, students sit down and write individual notes to each person the organization serves. The kids are encouraged to share positive thoughts and whatever is on their minds. Instead of “Get well soon,” the notes might say “It was such a beautiful day in the garden” or “I really enjoyed making these enchiladas for you.”

“It’s great to see how much they love this part,” said Leathers. “A lot of times, the clients write back, and that makes them feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, they cared about my card.’” Just outside the Healing Meals kitchen is a wall with hundreds of notes the students have received. 

While much of the volunteer experience unfolds organically, leadership and confidence are intentionally nurtured at Healing Meals. Students earn a Blue Apron after 50 hours of service and a Chef’s Coat after 100 hours. This final designation comes with an invitation to join the youth development committee, for which students meet regularly and contribute ideas and feedback that have led to enhancements in the program.

Addie, who will be leaving for college in the fall, has been volunteering at Healing Meals for three years. She was recently invited to join the board as a junior member. She said that, since starting at Healing Meals, her perspective on the work has flipped from “something that would be good on my resume that I should probably do”  to “an unbelievable experience that would also be good on my resume.” 

“I feel like people are motivated by what looks good or what their parents tell them to do. But for me, getting my Chef’s Coat, joining the development committee and then the board, these were things I worked for, I wanted for myself, that I’m proud of.” 

Leathers said the difference between students like Addie and those who have been “voluntold,” as she calls it, can be seen in the number of them who stay on. Eighty-five to 90 percent of the students that volunteer at Healing Meals continue with the program, whether they complete 20 hours or achieve 300. Leathers believes that what keeps the students coming back is the direct impact they have on the lives of the people they serve. 

“There aren’t a lot of volunteer opportunities for kids that can provide that,” she said.

“I still remember my favorite story that was shared in circle,” Addie said. “It was about a client who had come to the Healing Meals facility to visit, and she had noticed our wall of hearts, titled ‘Client Wall.’ She had asked if her name would be up there, and she was told to go see for herself. When she had found her name written in a heart, she had broken down in tears. She had felt so loved. In that moment, I really felt my impact. I had played a part in making this woman feel loved, something I never want to stop doing.”

Healing Minds

In addition to regular check-ins, Healing Meals surveys its students about the impact of their experiences. Increasingly, they have reported improvements to their emotional and mental health. In an email to Leathers, one parent wrote of her son, “He has reduced anxiety, reduced stress, increased confidence, increased social interactions and increased trust in others. He has since joined a sport and a club at school with his new-found bravery.”

Leathers sees this qualitative data as too powerful to ignore at a time when the adolescent and young adult mental health crisis continues to confound parents and educators. Indeed, there is ample evidence in the literature as to the benefits of service work on the mental health of young people, particularly through programs like Healing Meals which involve reflection on purpose and meaning.

Additionally, Leathers believes the palpable feeling of inter-generational connection at Healing Meals can be an anecdote to the unprecedented rates of loneliness youth are reporting and Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy deemed “an epidemic.” 

Leathers is confident that as the organization expands to meet the increasing demand for medically tailored meals, the youth development program will grow, too. She has plans to open a new youth program in Hartford, Conn. in 2026 and looks forward to expanding in other parts of the state.

This summer, Healing Meals has launched its first-ever paid internship program for youth leaders who have earned their Blue Aprons. It is informed by the developmental relationship framework of the Search Institute, a youth-serving organization that conducts and applies research to promote positive youth development. As part of the program, Palmer is leading a session on life design that asks students to consider what they value and to reflect on how they want to feel.  Leathers sees the internship program as a pilot where staff and youth leaders are co-creating what they hope will be a more formal version of the iterative model that has helped so many young people grow. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.