Senior Director, Feeding Change, Milken Institute Health
Holly Freishtat is the senior director of Feeding Change at the Milken Institute. She is an experienced director, transformative leader, and strategist with a 20-year track record developing and implementing food system policies and programs.
Athena Rae Roesler is a director on the Public Health team at Milken Institute Health, where she leads a portfolio of work focused on prevention and chronic disease.
Senior Associate, Innovative Finance, Milken Institute Finance
Ivy Hsu is a senior associate of innovative finance at the Milken Institute. During Hsu’s time at the Institute, she has worked on projects around structuring sustainable funding models for new antibiotics to help curb antimicrobial resistance and streamlining the sustainable bond market for municipal issuers.
Diet-related chronic disease continues to rise throughout the US population and, with it, the cost of health care. Despite record spending, the US experiences the lowest life expectancy among high-income countries and demonstrates declining health outcomes year after year. Communities of color and people experiencing food insecurity bear a disproportionate burden of these impacts. With billions of dollars sunk in medical costs, lives lost from preventable diseases, and lagging productivity, medical and public health experts have increasingly turned to efforts that prioritize food as medicine.
Food Is Medicine (FIM) has been increasingly leveraged in health care to prevent, treat, and manage diet-related health needs as well as address food insecurity as a direct response to research showing the importance of nutrition in overall health.
However, FoodRx, or Food Is Medicine prescriptions, have been slow to scale and keep pace with the rising disease burden. This report, Market Solutions for Scaling Food Is Medicine Prescriptions, summarizes the research and key findings of a Milken Institute Financial Innovations Lab®, which brought together 40 health plans, policy experts, government representatives, FoodRx technology companies, food retailers, consultants, and community-based organizations, including members of the Feeding Change Food Is Medicine Task Force to determine areas of technology solutions, funding priority, and investment vehicles to help finance these efforts.
In September 2024, the Milken Institute released Insights on Investments in Food Systems Transformation: Pathways to COP30, which explored the state of food systems investing, the risks and benefits, and the challenges and opportunities.
Food and nutrition insecurity is a health issue far too big to ignore. Diet-related diseases are the leading cause of death in the US for adults. When people and communities lack access to affordable, healthy food, we see the impact in our...
This case study focuses on Brazil. With dense urban centers (where nearly 90 percent of the population lives), a landmass that spans the Amazon rainforest and borders with 10 countries, and a tropical climate, Brazil is particularly...
Whether evaluating access to health care, transportation, or healthy foods, there is a disproportionate impact in underserved communities. For example, nearly 24 million people live in food deserts in the US, low-income communities located...
Despite lessons learned from COVID-19 and other outbreaks, the world remains ill-prepared for the next pandemic. Since 2020, FasterCures has promoted collaboration to develop and improve early warning systems around the world, convening...
Feeding Change is a team of food-system experts within the Milken Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank, who activate social and financial capital, engage policymakers and industry leaders, and convene key stakeholders to catalyze...
Investing in the intersection of food and healthcare is critical to achieving nutrition equity. Feeding Change submitted a letter informed by the Food Is Medicine Task Force that provides comments to inform the national strategy for the...
Senior Director, Feeding Change, Milken Institute Health
Holly Freishtat is the senior director of Feeding Change at the Milken Institute. She is an experienced director, transformative leader, and strategist with a 20-year track record developing and implementing food system policies and programs.
The Financial Innovations Labs® and FasterCures teams have collaborated on a project to identify new models for financing the antimicrobial resistant antibiotic pipeline. These past 18 months have demonstrated how consequential public...
In order to brainstorm mechanisms to continue to finance important vaccination delivery programs, the Milken Institute convened a Financial Innovations Lab® in Jakarta in August 2016. After years of economic growth, Indonesia has begun to...