Having recently celebrated our 40th anniversary, Citymeals is at a turning point in our work. We were founded to fill a gap in the City's  home-delivered meals program (HDM), which provides homebound older adults with one meal a day only 5 days a week. Citymeals privately fundraises and in turn funds the community based organizations that contract with the City to provide an additional 2 meals each week. However, over the years, the cost of food and the number of older adults in need has skyrocketed. 
We partnered with the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute last year to conduct research that showed deep levels of food insecurity among older New Yorkers participating in the City's HDM and congregate meals programs at older adult centers. With 48% reporting some level of food insecurity and 65% living on $15,000 a year or less, it's clear that more must be done to ensure that older New Yorkers are able to age in place safely.
 While Citymeals has already piloted some new programs aimed at getting more food to our meal recipients in new ways, our response to this crisis is limited by our need to fill this critical weekend meals gap in the HDM program. Through successful advocacy, however, Intro 770 was introduced by Council Member Linda Lee, which would require the City to expand it's program to provide meals 365 days a year. 
 If the bill passes, Citymeals has a great opportunity to shift the way we have historically worked to feed homebound older New Yorkers. But a shift of this magnitude has raised serious concerns amongst board members. How would we manage transitioning from being primarily a funder filling a gap in a public program to being primarily a direct service provider working outside of the City's HDM system? 

 This is essentially a change management project, which we believe will entail the development of a few programmatic models, including financials and infrastructure needs, and a process for this transition, including timelines one where we must quickly shift in the event that the bill passes this year or next and another where we are in more control of this timing and decide to transition regardless of the bill's passage. 

 The goal of this project is to make concrete some of the changes that Citymeals may be required to make in the next 2 to 3 years. We hope to educate the board about what new service models could look like, and map out how such a shift could begin to take shape over the next year (if the bill passes sooner than expected) or the next few years.