The Youth Co-op Connection project focuses on cooperative education, in practice, necessitates active learning, self-directed inquiry, and hands-on experience. It promotes learning that is relevant and connected to the lives of young individuals, nurturing their ability to question, analyze, and challenge the status quo, in collective action. This project centers underserved Black youth and will offer a nuanced and comprehensive open source curriculum for cooperative education, catered to middle school age youth. The curriculum design will be adaptable and applicable across diverse education settings, including public schools, youth entrepreneurship programs, alternative education settings, and after-school programs.

Our mission is to generate health and decrease chronic disease by facilitating the practices underlying physical and psychological well being for diverse, low-income, and under-resourced populations. Open Source Wellness has developed an innovative, transdiagnostic, and experiential model for supporting health behavior change, by facilitating the basic practices that underlie physical and psychological health outcomes (physical movement, healthy meals, stress reduction, and social support). Our work spans the clinical-community continuum, collaborating with healthcare providers to fill “Behavioral Prescriptions,” and working deeply within communities to build trust, social capital, and peer leadership around health and well being.

Open Source Wellness partners with FQHC’s to deliver virtual group medical visits, and achieves both clinical outcomes and a revenue-positive implementation for the clinic: due to dramatically increased billing, the clinic generates more revenue than it costs to contract with OSW. The earning power of this model has been well-documented, and is compelling to potential clinical FQHC partners. However, in sharing about the OSW group medical visit partnership model, we find that FQHC CFO’s are understandably risk-averse, focused on avoiding any possible loss especially during a time of lost revenue, diminished billing, and massive operational changes due to COVID-19. While they fully understand that partnership with OSW would in fact generate additional revenue for their clinics, the risk of committing to a financial contract before revenues increase is intolerable. 

In response to this challenge, the OSW leadership team and board are committed to researching, designing, and implementing a risk reduction system for new clinical partners, effectively removing barriers to implementation in clinics and communities of color that are resource-strapped and understandably cautious about contracting with community partners.

In 2019, the Real Food Campaign (RFC) lab worked with 100 grower partners and 15 citizen scientists to process 1,800 samples from 20 states in the US to test 6 crops: carrots, spinach, tomatoes, kale, lettuce and grapes. As samples enter the lab they are tested with the Bionutrient Meter then extracted and analyzed for antioxidants, polyphenols, and 17 minerals (2018 results). Our lab’s accomplishments over the past two years were a major step in advancing the Bionutrient Food Association’s mission of increasing quality in the food system.

The BFA is now creating a new administrative role for a Citizen Science Coordinator in order to expand our Citizen Science initiative. The initiative began two years ago with a data partner project to engage consumers in data collection, and in 2019 we launched our grower partner program, bringing growers into the process as well. During this time, participants have helped us to document management practices, environmental conditions, soil health, plant health, carbon sequestration, nutrient density and farm viability. We can now begin to look scientifically for the
connections between these factors.

Our clinical healthcare-based model, developed in partnership with Alameda Health System (Hayward Wellness Center), has emerged as a spreadable/scalable intervention, and has generated substantial interest in the last year. In brief, Open Source Wellness delivers its signature trans diagnostic, experiential program in full workflow integration and electronic-medical-record integration on site at the clinic. Importantly, and key to our success in spreading this model, we have created a financially sustainable model via group medical visits (an MD or NP participates in the group, and then bills insurance for each patient).

The partnership inherent in this model builds in a robust level of clinical-community integration: services are co-designed, dually delivered, and fully integrated into the clinical workflow (via screening, referral, and booking). Of particular importance, due to the emphasis on peer and lay leadership, as well as behavioral treatment and prevention instead of medical intervention, this kind of partnership is profoundly affordable and scalable across the healthcare safety net. With content similar to Dean Ornish’s highly effective Lifestyle Medicine program (recently funded by CMS) but at less than 1⁄4 the cost, the OSW Behavioral Pharmacy model has the potential and the vision to be the democratization of health behavior change.