Thursday, August 31, 2017

September Update

Dear Community Partners and Key Stakeholders,
Solar Eclipse 2017 - Irene Prieto, Flickr Creative Commons
Transition is upon us!  The Solar Eclipse was an amazing way to celebrate that time of transition and we hope many of you were able to experience (safely) this awesome event. Summer vacations are winding down and school is gearing up. CHIP is undergoing some transitions as well.  With thoughts toward our next CHIP cycle, the Community Health Assessment and CHIP team will be embarking on a quality improvement process to reorganize and streamline our work to be more effective.  We'll be taking a brief hiatus from convening our CHIP advisory team but workgroup activity will continue to happen and we will be piloting some changes between now and the first of the year.  Look for information on reconvening with strategy sessions in January and February.  In the meantime we'll continue to keep you connected with a monthly newsletter update and Facebook.  
The CHIP team has just said good bye to Lourdes Lorenz-Miller as she moves into a new position at MAHEC working on continuing education in rural WNC communities.  We also say good bye to our summer interns.  Anina Aaron, from Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, has spent the summer updating our scorecard with new data and working to help build-out our scorecard capabilities for specific strategy areas to better assist our workgroups.  Judy Councel, an intern with the UNC Eshleman School of Pharmacy, spent several weeks with us this summer working with our diabetes Photo Voice initiative in Shiloh and supporting our Food Security partner collaboration. We are so appreciative of what they have contributed to our time and will miss them all!

September brings two major events for CHIP partners. The faith community can be a critical partner in addressing our community's alarming opioid crisis and an action-oriented training has been planned to help equip leaders in the faith community with what they need to inform, educate and build agency for their congregations on this dangerous epidemic.  Registration is open until September 7th. 
Please contact Chiloh Campbell if you would like to learn more or be trained in the presentation materials.

Open Streets in just a few short weeks away and we are in the final push for volunteers and partners to hit the streets with fun, active and engaging activities.  Our ask is for you to get the word out to bring in at least 40 more volunteers and more activities.  Like our Face Book, post flyers, hand out post cards.  If you need a quick flyer or postcard or want to share the latest press release, you can find them in our Open Streets Final Push Toolkit. You can read more about how to begin spreading the word on our Engage Page.

This month brings a three annual events to support some of our amazing partners. The annual Feasting for FEAST is just around the corner on September 13th. FEAST envisions a community where kids of all income levels eat fruits and vegetables every day.  A worthy cause to support, don't you think? And the vegetables at this event are delicious and prepared by some of the best chefs in town!  Pisgah Legal's 7th Annual Poverty Forum this year features Pulitzer-Prize winning author Matthew Desmond on September 28thDesmond is the author of the best-selling book Evicted, which tells the stories of children and families living in poverty and the desperate housing challenges they face.   And then there are sweet potatoes. Every year Homegrown Babies provides an opportunity to sample a range of delicious sweet and savory sweet potatoes for a good cause. This year's 8th Annual Sweet Potato Cooking Contest on September 30th will benefit Sistas Caring 4 Sistas (SC4S) - Doulas for Social Justice.   More information on all of these with link to purchase tickets can be found on our Support page.

With fewer meetings it is more important than ever to share your needs for support, resources and information to help us all be successful in our work together! Send Facebook or Blog content to Terri at anytime and Update information the second week of the month.

In appreciation of all you do!

Deanna & Terri