In a ribbon cutting ceremony, Maggie A. Riley, M.D., assistant professor and medical director of the Ypsilanti Health Center (YHC), officially opened Maggie’s Market, a new food pantry serving the health center’s patients.
Maggie’s Marketplace now offers food to all YHC patients and their families to ensure they have access to healthy food. The marketplace focuses on healthy foods like whole grains, fresh produce and other nutritional options. Beyond food, patients will also be provided with recipes developed by the health center’s dietician, April Pickrel. Sixteen patients utilized the food pantry on it's first day and staff at YHC are all thrilled to be able to provide this service to their patients.
“Food insecurity can affect a person’s health in a myriad of ways. By providing healthy foods and recipes to accompany them, we aim to improve the physical and mental health of our patients,” noted Dr. Riley.
Maggie’s Marketplace, named after its champion, Dr. Riley, is the first of its kind effort at Michigan Medicine and the only U-M health center to offer this service.
Patients can make an appointment to visit Maggie’s Marketplace Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. by calling 734-482-6221. Patient walk ins during those times will also be accepted.
Early on in her role as medical director, she created a survey to determine what problems her patients were facing that could affect their health, but were outside of the scope of traditional health care. She found that nearly 50% of patients surveyed faced food insecurity or felt they were not always able to purchase enough food to feed their families.
“This is something that we have to address,” Dr. Riley said. “It is really hard for a patient to focus on improving their blood pressure when they don’t have enough to eat or enough to feed their children. If we are truly going to have an affect on a person’s health and well-being, we have to meet their needs more broadly.”
While the vision of the food pantry was Dr. Riley’s, a lot of work went into its execution. The project was lead by Collette Ososkie and completed by a committee including Ladele Cochran, Spring Stonebraker, America Gomez, Kendall Pierce, Katie Scott and Cathleen Taylor. A team from Food Gatherers including LeRonica Roberts, Markell Miller and Wendy Pestrue, was also there to celebrate their new partnership with the Ypsilanti Health Center.
Maggie’s Marketplace was made possible through grants from the Mott Administration Annual Fund and the Friends Gift Shops.
If you would like to support this effort, please visit: https://leadersandbest.umich.edu/find/#!/give/basket/fund/330279. Food donations should be made directly to Food Gatherers.
