Clinton County has received a quarter-million dollar grant to promote and develop healthy and active communities.
The New York State Health Foundation awards grants from the Healthy Neighborhoods Fund initiative to help communities find ways to create healthier and more active lifestyles for residents. Grant recipients must increase the availability of healthy, affordable food; improve infrastructure; and link residents to lifestyle change programs.
New York State Health Foundation Vice President Jacqueline Martinez Garcel: “We’ve made a commitment to address health inequities in rural and in low income urban cities where residents don’t have appropriate access to healthy and affordable food. Who live in places where walking outside may not be safe for a number of reasons. Or where parks and recreation haven’t really been able to invest in open spaces for people to exercise. So we’ve made this commitment to address health inequities. We know that when people live in healthier neighborhoods they do in fact end up having healthier outcomes. Especially when it comes to diabetes and obesity and some diet-related diseases that are really burdening our health care system right now.”
Clinton County is among six communities across the state chosen for the $2 million dollar program and will receive $250,000.
Clinton County Health Department grant writers Karen Derusha and Mandy Snay point out that the area has been working on healthy community initiatives for some time. Derusha, the Principle Public Health Educator, says this grant expands the work and allows the county to work more in-depth with communities. “The two main focus areas that we’re looking at with this particular initiative is access to healthy and affordable foods and increasing physical activity opportunities for all residents of all ages.”
Supervising Public Health Nutritionist Mandy Snay adds that when assessing specific health conditions, the county varies against national and state averages depending upon what’s assessed. She says tackling problems is often community specific. “We have similar problems but every community is different and how you’d tackle the problem is going to be community-specific. So when we’re looking at healthy eating and getting families more active those types of behaviors are preventative behaviors that we want everybody practicing because they’re related to so many different chronic issues. I think if we’re practicing those right from the get-go we’re going to prevent a lot of those diagnoses. We’re going to keep people healthier longer. And we’re going to have a healthier community and a happier community, a more active and productive community.”
Twenty-five percent of the funds are to be set aside to identify specific resident concerns, according to Jacqueline Martinez Garcel. “For example we learned this from some work that our foundation in Rochester has done. Residents said that poor lighting in a park was what prevented them from wanting to go outside and take walks or play with their children. So part of the grants will go and address those needs immediately. So if people say we have poor lighting on sidewalks or in a park that money has been set aside to be used to address that immediately. We want to be responsive to residents while we try and work with government agencies to think differently about how they use their resources to improve health.”
Again, Mandy Snay. “Residents can actually anticipate that we’ll be going to them to see what it is that they want in their neighborhoods from this. We always want their input and I think those large community planning events we try to get that representation. But I think it’ll be a little bit more obvious as we’re reaching out to different areas within the county to get their feedback in how these resources would actually be used or what is it they feel they need in their own community.”
The two-year Healthy Neighborhoods grant was announced Thursday.
