The following testimony was given and submitted by Jill Chodak, MS, RD, CDN, Director of Food-Based Healthcare for Foodlink at the Aug. 31 public hearing in Albany concerning the 1115 Medicaid Redesign Team Waiver Extension Request, hosted by the state’s Department of Health.

PUBLIC HEARING: Check out the replay (24:00 for Foodlink’s testimony)

LEARN MORE: Foodlink’s Food-based Healthcare initiatives

Good afternoon, 

My name is Jill Chodak, a registered dietitian and the Director of Food-Based Healthcare at Foodlink, a Rochester-based food bank that serves 10 counties in the Finger Lakes region, distributing 28.8 million pounds of food and 2.4 million meals from our Community Kitchen last year alone — the most in our history. 

I came to Foodlink last year, after 7 years of seeing patients at an outpatient clinic in Rochester. I made this career change because my patients reminded me every day that they could not make necessary dietary or health changes without resources and actual access to food. My patients often had to choose between buying groceries or paying rent, utility bills, or for critical medications. That’s an impossible choice that no one should ever have to make, and it broke my heart as a clinician, and as a mother, to hear about the circumstances our neighbors face in our communities. As healthcare providers we can preach all day long about making healthy choices to improve health outcomes, but nothing will change if our neighbors can’t access or afford healthy food and other critical resources. 

 In New York State, and across the country, there is a growing recognition that health equity extends beyond physical and behavioral health and into health-related social needs. I joined the Foodlink team to lead our work on the 1115 Medicaid Waiver because this is a one-of-a-kind opportunity to use Medicaid dollars to close health equity gaps and to provide consistent nutritious food to at-risk families. This work has been a dream come true.  

For the past year, Foodlink has been a leading provider of nutrition services under the waiver in the Finger Lakes region. We offer services such as: nutrition counseling, cooking supplies, food vouchers to our Curbside Market locations, FoodRx Food boxes, and pantry stocking for pregnant/postpartum women and high-risk kids in three rural counties in our service area. This work truly demonstrates that food is medicine and gives community members a more equitable shot at improving their health. 

As a trauma-informed dietitian entrenched in doing this work and serving our waiver program members daily, I’m seeing first-hand how these services are changing the lives of families mentally, physically, clinically and socially. Members receiving our food and nutrition services report weight loss, lower blood sugars and more peace of mind knowing they don’t have to worry where their food is coming from this week. Better yet, frankly it’s something I live for as a clinician—I get to see them come back to life. It’s working.  

Yet, we need an extension. The impactful work that we are doing now took a long time to plan and execute. Foodlink has been connected to the Waiver since the original application. We were in a good position to hit the ground running because we had the infrastructure, staffing, and acumen to do this work, but we did not serve our first Medicaid members until July 2025 because the regional and state infrastructure was still being built.  

 So while we have been working in overdrive and expanding our services by leaps and bounds for this past year, the truth is that our work is just getting started. We have only just scratched the surface of how this work can truly drive change in our communities.  And as we all know, true change takes time. We strongly support a 5-year extension of this transformational program. 

More time allows us all the opportunity to impact thousands more households with nutrition-related services, and to produce the results we all know are coming —improved health outcomes, lowered healthcare costs, and more collaborative support for some of our most vulnerable neighbors. 

Thank you.