This year is The Heimerdinger Foundation’s 11th year of service through Meals 4 Health and Healing. As we commemorate this milestone as an organization, we are excited to share with you that we have secured a new headquarters at 430 East Iris in Nashville's Berry Hill neighborhood. This space will enable us to bring our administrative offices, community meeting and learning spaces, as well as commercial kitchen, under one roof.
For 10 years, Calvary United Methodist Church generously allowed us to co-locate and use their kitchen and preparation spaces for our program. We are so grateful to them! To grow in service and efficiencies in our operation, we have found a new site that has room for us to deepen our reach and expand our programs and number of days of service. This space requires renovation and tailoring to our needs to include a new commercial kitchen, meeting and office space, and much more!
We currently operate out of three different locations: administrative office space, a storage unit, and a borrowed/shared kitchen. We have found a new single location which will enable:
- 24/7 access
- Increased meal production, teen volunteer shifts, nutrition classes and cooking demos
- A space for team collaboration and more effective communication
- A significant pantry and walk-in freezer to buy bulk and reduce price and properly store food
- Access to convenient and efficient wholesale food delivery
- Program scope expansion
- Community partnership expansion
- Service audience deepening and expansion - more nutrient-centered meals for general healing
- Social enterprise initiation and expansion
Our new home at 430 East Iris provides a unique full building with an on-site training/sales room that can accommodate 50 people and is equipped with a built-in functioning catering kitchen with ample on-site parking in the convenient Berry Hill neighborhood.
We currently provide up to 800 servings in two days of production. With increased capacity, we estimate being able to produce ultimately more than 2,000 servings weekly - a 40% increase.
Through partnerships with more medical partners, we could explore clinical trials, pilots, and medically tailored meals to serve distinct disease sets and to increase program impact.
We are thrilled about what this new, central location with a dedicated commercial kitchen for our mission will mean for our ability to serve more people in the years to come. Stay tuned as this project progresses as we will be keeping you posted with highlights and more milestones as we grow!
