MAHONING VALLEY, Ohio – The Healthy Community Partnership, a strategic initiative of the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, has released its 2022-2023 Years in Review report (click HERE to read), highlighting the work of community partners toward creating lasting change to health in the Valley.
Now in its eighth year, the Healthy Community Partnership has grown to include more than 60 individual members representing just as many organizations across its three action teams – Active Transportation, Healthy Food, and Parks & Greenspaces. To supplement the vital work done by action team members and turn their insight and ideas into real-world change, HCP has grown to include three support staff: Sophia Buggs, the Mahoning Valley Food Access Director; Dalton Campana, the Community Recreation Graduate Assistant; and Lydia Lynch, the Trumbull Health & Wellness Coordinator.
The trio’s work is in addition to that of Robin Perry, who joined as the Partnership’s Network Coordinator full time in 2022, and founding director Sarah Lowry, who was promoted to be CFMV’s Senior Director of Community Impact in fall 2023.
“The work those action teams do is done not just by one organization who takes part in HCP, but by a whole committee who is there to aid that support position,” Perry says. “That lets the action teams do a lot more hands-on work. That’s the part of the Partnership that we want to foster with our shared power model. That’s what makes the Healthy Community Partnership unique, I think.”
Among the other major steps forward highlighted in the report (AVAILABLE HERE) are the hosting of a food policy summit in Youngstown that drew 75 community members to hear about what can be done to make healthy foods more accessible; the Safe Streets series to demonstrate what an fully inclusive model of transportation can look like in our communities; and the implementation of a Tree Corps for Mahoning and Trumbull Counties that will see shade trees planted throughout the region.
“What’s exciting is seeing the work of the Partnership in its intent to move toward larger, longer term change,” says Lowry, using the Tree Corps as an example.
For that project, the Community Foundation committed the initial startup funding, which was then leveraged into a five year, $5 million federal grant.
“That kind of scaling up is what we want to see and what collective impact is trying to do. We want to bring people together and leverage all of our resources to make a bigger difference for more people over a longer length of time,” she continues.
While these kind of projects are what was in mind when the Healthy Community Partnership was created, what’s been equally as important has been the building of an effort that is truly community-wide. Members on the action teams represent organizations from as large as Mercy Health to as small as the South East Side Community Association, a neighborhood group in Warren spearheaded by one resident. And given the disruption that the pandemic caused to coalitions – not just in the Valley, but nationally – Lowry and Perry emphasize that the relationships between all members is what helped the initiative weather the disruption.
“We saw many collaborative efforts fade away when HCP didn’t. That’s a testament to the fact that we took the time early on to do trust-building and focusing on relationships,” Lowry says. “We didn’t want to move through a checklist; we wanted to do things together and that let us get to this point where now big-scale systems change can happen.”
And now with several wins under its belt – from what’s highlighted in the 2022-2023 Years in Review report to previous efforts with the Double Up SNAP Perks advocacy – the stage is set to build on that momentum and amplify existing efforts.
“Yes, policy change is important. Yes, seeing where resources are going is important. But the deeper level change where we shift how the community interacts with each, how power is distributed, how people see and understand the world around them – those are all things that I wasn’t sure were on the radar for anyone when we started,” Lowry says. “But it’s grown into important hearts-and-minds work that we’ve learned is necessary to address decades-old inequities in health.”
Pictured at top: The launch of the Youngstown Tree Corps, a project facilitated in part by the Healthy Community Partnership and funded by the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley. With the success of the program, a similar program was launched in Warren with federal funding.