On Wednesday, Dec. 10, Feeding Westchester , the county’s food bank, celebrated its 1,000th delivery to qualified Medicaid recipients via DoorDash, the nation’s largest food delivery platform. It’s the result of an innovative new partnership across the business, government and nonprofit sectors designed to increase outreach to the hungry in Westchester County by integrating social challenges like food insecurity, along with housing affordability and transportation access, into the health-care system.
To affect this outreach, Feeding Westchester – which serves nearly 300 programs and partners, including 170 food pantries and soup kitchens that receive almost 250,000 visits a month – contracted in January with the new Hudson Valley Care Coalition (HVCC), which New York state has designated as the lead entity for the area’s Social Care Network (SCN). Headquartered in Tarrytown, the HVCC addresses health-related social needs, such as food insecurity, housing instability and lack of transportation, for Medicaid beneficiaries in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Orange, Dutchess, Sullivan and Ulster counties. It is one of nine Social Care Networks in New York, which the state created under a Section 1115 Medicaid waiver that allows states to think outside the box to implement better health outcomes.
“At DoorDash, we know that nutrition is key to building healthy communities,” Daniel Riff, head of government and nonprofit operations, said in a statement. “Through Project DASH,, we’re supporting the transformative work of Social Care Networks across New York and are thrilled to see partners like Feeding Westchester tap into our delivery platform to quickly and easily scale their programs under the Medicaid 1115 Waiver. Together, we’re ensuring that eligible Medicaid beneficiaries can receive essential nutrition without facing transportation or mobility barriers.”
New York’s waiver project, up for renewal in 2027, is considered a bellwether in Medicaid innovation, said Amie Parikh, HVCC’s CEO: “New York state went all in from the beginning, integrating health-related social needs into the health-care system.” (Connecticut has used the 1115 waiver to address substance abuse, while North Carolina has tapped into the waiver in rural areas to pay farmers to feed the hungry.)
Under the 1115 waiver, New York state received $7.1 billion from the federal government, regranting $44 million to the Hudson Valley via HVCC, which in turn is putting $1 million of administrative infrastructure into Feeding Westchester’s delivery of medically tailored, shelf-stable food boxes to qualified Medicaid recipients.
“We would never have had the capital to be playing a health-care role,” said Brad Kerner, vice president of community engagement and impact at Feeding Westchester, which received a $2.4 million cut from the federal government for this fiscal year. “This way we can concentrate on what we do best – feeding people.”
HVCC works with 150 organizations, such as United Way 211, to identify those Medicaid participants who would best benefit from the program, including the homebound. At first, Feeding Westchester incorporated deliveries of food to these beneficiaries into its schedule of drop-offs to food pantries and soup kitchens. After 204 deliveries, the food bank realized this was not the most efficient way to do this, Kerner said. Enter its partnership with DoorDash, which began deliveries Oct. 15.
The result has been a win, win, win, said Kerner, with the food bank and the food delivery giant finding a reliable partner in each other and participants receiving four rotating boxes of proteins, grains and fruits and vegetables on Wednesday mornings, enough to supplement three meals a day, seven days a week. Parikh stressed that those who do not qualify for the program are not abandoned. Rather, HVCC and its partners work with them to obtain other county and state resources.
The Dec. 10 milestone comes at a moment when the issue of food insecurity has never been more urgent — and more confusing. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) became a political football during the recent federal government shutdown. Now the Trump Administration – seeking, it said, to eliminate fraud and waste – is threatening to withhold SNAP administrative funding from 20-plus Democratic-led states, including New York and Connecticut, that have refused to provide recipients’ personal data, such as immigration status and Social Security numbers. For their part, the Democratic states have said that the federal government has all the information it needs to keep the program honest and that the request for more has already been blocked by one court.
But as The Washington Post reported: “(U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brook) Rollins claimed that data USDA had received from complying states showed ‘186,000 dead people receiving benefits, 500,000 Americans receiving benefits two times, so double what they should be receiving. We’ve arrested more than 120 people with SNAP fraud.’”
Of some 42 million SNAP recipients nationwide – with nearly three million in New York state and more than 390,000 in Connecticut – almost 90% were born in the United States. Come Jan. 1, they will be facing new restrictions on what they can buy with those benefits and new work requirements. Most who can work, do so, but they do not earn a living wage.
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Even in Westchester, one of the wealthiest counties in the U.S., there are some 74,000 SNAP recipients. More than one in three residents, 39% of the county’s population, is food insecure. “That’s mind-boggling,” Kerner said. He added that according to United Way’s ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) data, a family of four in Westchester needs an income of $133,000 to meet its basic needs.
Meeting those needs, including food, housing and transportation, makes for healthier citizens, Kerner and Parikh said. And that, they added, makes for a healthier, wealthier society.
