Healthcare Heroes: Josephine Connolly-Schoonen

"We have built a very diverse and cutting edge nutrition division here, and we are active in all areas of #nutrition, including growing food on our Stony Brook Heights rooftop farm, teaching people to connect with food through our kids cooking classes, conducting outpatient nutrition therapy, both in individual sessions and in groups like our Target Fitness Program, and providing the most evidence-based nutrition therapy for our inpatients here at Stony Brook Medicine.

We are really proud of our #StonyBrook Heights Rooftop Farm because it's a true symbol of our whole food, plant-based philosophy and being in touch with natural foods. We were fortunate to be funded by The New York State Department of Health in about 2010 to initiate community gardens, and we started 10 gardens in financially-stressed communities. I asked The New York State Department of Health if we could start one here at the hospital. They said yes, so I walked around with the facilities folks, and we picked out a spot!

I brought my family to the site one weekend, my little one was five and my oldest was a teenager. It was my family, covered in dirt, that cleared the first area of our rooftop farm. And that's how the #farm started. Ever since, we've had a dedicated group of faculty, staff and volunteers from across campus. Our dietetic interns have also been a key piece in maintaining our farm. It's just a beautiful part of what we do.

Another recent development from our nutrition team is our ‘Food Farmacy.’ We have a farm-to-bedside approach and we tell our patients “nutrition is so important for your healing and recovery, that we actually grow some of it for YOU”. In all reality, our food service department is incredible, and they purchase the majority of their vegetables, so we wanted to come up with a meaningful way to help our patients using the food we grow here.

In collaboration with #Nursing, who has been so supportive of this initiative, we started screening patients for food insecurity. We then provide those patients with two weeks of supplemental food based on their diet order. So not only is it healthy food, it also aligns with their diet needs and preferences. We also help them to connect to more sustainable resources for food, like local food pantries or ways to apply for food aid.

I'm really proud of the diverse services that we offer and how we are really helping to change people's lives through nutrition.”

-Josephine Connolly-Schoonen, PhD, RD, Executive Director, Nutrition Division at Stony Brook Medicine