Dr. Sara Bleich is the first Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity at the USDA and leading a whole-of-Department approach to tackling food and nutrition insecurity. Dr. Bleich will be delivering remarks at our Annual CACFP Conference. She will provide a brief overview of how USDA explains the intersection between nutrition security, health equity, and structural racism. She will share USDA’s actions on promoting and elevating nutrition security including how the Department aims to leverage the recent, historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health to help accelerate progress on the Conference’s goals. Throughout her remarks, she will highlight existing and enhanced ways the CACFP community can engage with USDA FNS.
Register now to be a part of this ongoing conversation at our Annual CACFP Conference.
Dr. Bleisch Bio: Dr. Sara Bleich is the Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity in the Food and Nutrition Service at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), after serving as the Senior Advisor for COVID-19 in the Office of the Secretary at USDA (2021). She is a policy expert and researcher who specializes in diet-related diseases, food insecurity and racial inequality with more than 175 peer-reviewed publications. She is on leave from her post as a Professor of Public Health Policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Kennedy School of Government, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Bleich
was also a White House Fellow during the Obama administration, where she worked at USDA as a Senior Policy Adviser for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services and with the First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! Initiative. She holds degrees from Columbia (BA, Psychology) and Harvard (PhD, Health Policy).
Join us on Monday, October 17th, during the Five Billion Meals and Counting: Advocacy for CACFP at the White House and Capitol Hill to continue the conversation and reflect on the community engagement and recommendations leading up to the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health; hear about what was championed (and what was missing) from the Conference activities; and action ahead for CACFP.
