Recent grant to support local health advocacy initiatives

Date: 1/23/2017

GREATER SPRINGFIELD – Up to 10 local organizations in Hampden County will receive additional funding for public health advocacy work, thanks to the recent round of grants awarded through Baystate Medical Center’s newly established Better Together program.

This funding will come through The Massachusetts Public Health Association, a Boston-based non-profit, which was among the eight state and local organizations that had grant submissions accepted for the 2016 funding cycle.

Andrea Freeman, field director for the Massachusetts Public Health Association (MPHA), said her organization saw the Baystate grant program as a way to potentially increase grass-roots health advocacy work in Western Massachusetts.

“We co-applied for this grant with the Western MA Health Equity Network.” Freeman said. “As the champion for public health in Massachusetts, MPHA partners with community-based organizations to raise awareness and advocate for policies and programs that prevent illness, disease, and injury – particularly among those vulnerable to health inequities. Baystate's Better Together grant is allowing us to focus on establishing and strengthening partnerships in Hampden County – a region with some of the worst health outcomes in the state. By combining the skill and the will with focused strategy, we can create healthier communities, together.”

According to statistics provided on the County Health Rankings and Roadmap website (www.countyhealthrankings.org), a program of the non-profit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Hampden County, which ranks 14th in the state for general health overall, has challenges in the areas of adult obesity, alcohol-induced driving deaths, sexually transferred diseases, unemployment and childhood poverty.

Freeman said MPHA received a one-year Community Education and Training grant from Baystate, and was in the process of identifying Western Massachusetts organizations interested in partnering with them for advocacy work. She said MPHA’s short-term goal for the funding was to work toward “state level policy changes that would be impossible without local voices, eg. better access to healthy affordable foods; more public transportation,” while the organization’s long-term goal for this advocacy work was to work for an increase in local “power within low income communities and communities of color.”

Announced on Jan. 6, the Better Together grant program, operated by Baystate Medical Center in conjunction with its Community Benefits Advisory Council, awarded the eight grants through the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Determination of Need (DoN) requirements to address community health needs. Additional recipients included: the HAP Housing Healthy Hill Initiative; Project Coach, the Project Coach Program; Revitalize Community Development Corporation, Revitalize Healthy Homes; Men of Color Health Awareness, Ludlow County Jail Project; Prison Birth Project, Doula Training Program; River Valley counseling Center, Transgender Conference; and Springfield Food Policy Council, What is Policy.