Healthy Communities of Clinton County Coalition Executive Director Lorra Archibald says it is a big deal to celebrate nights with the Community Celebration like they did at the Trinity Hope Center Wednesday night.
“We want to celebrate the victories because it is important for the community to know what we do,” said Archibald. “It’s more important we celebrate the successes that Clinton County and Frankfort as a whole celebrate together. That’s the whole idea of a coalition. All of us working together.”
It was a great night overall as Healthy Communities celebrated with all of its separate entities plus around 145 people that managed to make their way to Trinity Hope on North Columbia Street.
“I think it (the evening) was a great success,” said Archibald. “It was a good representation of our partners, our city and county government here, the people we work with and lots of members of our recovery community.”
To show how great of a year 2023 was, Archibald said Healthy Communities raised about $1.3 million in grant money.
“It was a great year in 2023 and we are looking forward to a much stronger year in 2024,” she said.
Healthy Communities focused their impact for 2023 in the Community in nine different ways:
- Covering Kids and Families — 592 applications, 545 approved, seven pending, 92 percent approval rate.
- Early Start Maternal Health and Baby and Me Tobacco Free — 278 moms helped with education and services. 19 mons helped to quit smoking.
- Awareness Campaign Mental Health & Substance use Disorder — Over 30,000 reached in Clinton and surrounding counties and states. From work in various events including Mental Health Games in nine different sports.
- YouthRISE! — 32 youth educators from four county schools, helped lead community and school-wide campaigns to help bring awareness to issues that mattered the most to them.
- Systems of Care — Helping 694 people with 388 services. A 96.2 percent rate in removing a clients barriers and giving them a more positive outlook for the future.
- Preventing Youth Suicide Initiative — Collaborated with North Central Health and the local four schools to write a new suicide pre/post vention policies impacting 3,059 students.
- Evidence Based Programming — 3,034 youth and adults participated in evidence based programming.
- Peer Recovery Services — Over 1,000 coaching sessions and continuing growth with 278 active clients seen monthly.
- Mobile Response Team — 54 people reached through first responder or referral who were connected to services.
Healthy Communities isn’t the only group that going to be experiencing a big boost from partnerships.
“They’ll probably have better expertise,” said Clinton County Health Department Executive Director Rodney Wann. “We’ll support them, learn from them, give them money to help with their mission which happens to be our mission as well. “Partnerships are going to be the key moving forward and the strength of partnerships means that our community gains from that.”
Wann also added taxpayers should be getting back more money from their taxes they’ve paid in the past.
“It was a very busy for us, many challenges not only filling in some staff positions and reorganizing the department,” said Wann. “We also had to deal with funding which itself was some sort of a challenge as every is skeptical when there is new money involved and what they want us to do with that.”
Wann added he hopes to be able to do even more in 2024.