Dear Community Partners and Key Stakeholders,
The Spring continues to be busy! We completed 2 additional Talk to Action meetings in April around the CHIP priorities Infant Mortality and Diabetes. Over 80 community members and 7 Advisory Council members have participated. For a more detailed update visit our Spring Talk to Action Updates page.
We are also excited to introduce our newest team member, Deanna LaMotte. Deanna joins our team TODAY after 3 years coordinating Triple P--Positive Parenting Program, a public-health approach to parenting support and child abuse prevention, in Buncombe County. She brings a passion for Community-Based Participatory Research and an Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) lens to all her work. To learn more about Deanna, visit our CHIP Staff Page.
We are pleased to announce that the Reinvestment Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have selected the city of Asheville to take part in the new Invest Health initiative, which aims to improve health in low-income neighborhoods in 50 cities across the nation.
Asheville was selected from more than 180 teams from 170 communities that applied to the initiative, and is formed of a five-member team: North Carolina Center for Health and Wellness at UNC Asheville, City of Asheville, Self-Help Credit Union, MAHEC, and the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville. Stacey Millet and Deborah Calhoun have served as a key partners in initial planning efforts and in developing the application, with the NC Center for Health and Wellness serving as the anchor organization. The project will span 18 months, beginning with a national kick-off meeting on June 7.
Please take a few minutes to read our Update featured sections this month to find out what you can do to share information that supports our CHIP priorities and partners.
This month's Get Involved Action is to learn more about our CHIP communication tools and how you can share information with our partners. Visit our Communication Tools Page for details on what's currently available and how to use them. In particular, we now have a Facebook Page! Take a minute to check it out and Like Us. Also take a moment to bookmark our Buncombe CHIP Blog. Note all our page links are found on the right-hand navigation bar so you can easily find what you are looking for.
Partnership Support this month includes a number of job. The Support Page will be updated each month. However, as long as an event or announcement is still relevant it will remain on the page.
Finally, our Resources You Can Use Page features A New Way to Talk About the Social Determinants of Health from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation which provides research and guidance on how to create more compelling, effective and persuasive messages that resonate across the political spectrum. You'll also resources from the April CHIP Advisory Council presentation on Food Security as well as documents from the April CHIP Update. We will continue to catalog resources in this space.
Please let us know how we can continue to build and improve ways to communicate and share in ways that help us be successful in our work together!
Sincerely,
Deborah, Deanna, and Terri
CHIP Health Improvement Specialist
