When Michael Edwards-Pruitt founded Open Hand in 1988, he wanted to cook and deliver meals to his friends who were dying from AIDS and, thus, too sick to cook for themselves.
The project began in the kitchen of a church with 14 friends, and in the 37 years since, it has grown into a nonprofit organization sending 5,000 made-from-scratch meals a day to people living with serious chronic health conditions.
“We’re all about healthy here,” Open Hand CEO Matthew Pieper told Rough Draft. “Everything we do is through the ‘food as medicine’ lens. The meals that we cook have very few preservatives, very few canned goods.”
Meals are made from scratch at Open Hand by a team of skilled staff and around 60 volunteers every day and designed by registered dieticians to meet the specific nutritional targets that individuals need. Along with delivering frozen, heat-and-eat meals across Atlanta, the organization also provides nutrition counseling to its clients with HIV, heart disease, diabetes, kidney failure, cancer, and other conditions.
“We’re going to teach you the kind of meals you need to eat and why, we’ll help explain [what] is going to help you absorb your medications or tolerate chemo better or tolerate radiation [for example],” Pieper said.
In October 2024, Open Hand announced the relocation and expansion of its headquarters to West Midtown, near Westside Reservoir Park, recently renamed for former Mayor Shirley Franklin. The new 43,000-square-foot facility, equipped with a 75 percent increase in storage, 100 percent increase in warehouse space, and seven more loading docks, allows for more efficient and expansive service to the people relying on the organization’s work.
“We’ve built a lot of capacity here,” Pieper said. “We won’t have to move for another 75 years.”
Along with making their day-to-day operations easier and more cost-efficient, Open Hand’s expansion has extended to the services they offer the community. They have introduced the Stephen Woods Workforce Development Program, a project aimed at empowering unemployed and underemployed individuals with the skills and resources necessary to thrive in the food service industry. They have also kicked off a cooking course with clients of Covenant House, an organization supporting young people facing homelessness that’s located across the street from Open Hand, to teach them how to grocery shop and cook nutritious meals at home.
According to data from the USDA, 13.5 percent of households in the U.S. were food-insecure, meaning they did not have access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all members of the household. From 2019-2021, Georgia had an average of 4.2 million households facing food insecurity, the ninth worst rate in the country, and even among those who are food secure, data show that most American adults are not meeting nutritional recommendations; according to findings from a 2022 CDC study, 12.3 percent and 10 percent of adults met fruit and vegetable recommendations, respectively.
For those facing chronic health conditions, the support of Open Hand’s nutritional education and meal delivery is crucial – not just to their physical health, but their mental health as well.
“Food is love, and that’s biblical. In biblical times, when someone’s ill, what’s one way to show them that they’re cared about? Bring them a meal, cook them a meal,” Pieper said. “…That’s why [Edwards-Pruitt] founded Project Open Hand. He was horrified that so many people dying of AIDS were being ostracized, marginalized, thrown out of their homes, fired from their jobs, abandoned by their friends… He thought if there are no treatments for people with HIV, at least we can cook them a meal. A lot of individuals who are dealing with serious illness are also battling depression, and it really makes a difference to have someone come deliver a meal.”
Those not facing serious health issues can still benefit from Open Hand’s “food as medicine” philosophy, as well as support their work, by purchasing meals from Good Measure. You can get delicious and nutritious meals like turkey tetrazzini, chicken and asparagus risotto, and beef stir fry delivered to your door, with 100 percent of profits benefiting Open Hand.
To learn more about Open Hand, visit openhandatlanta.org.