What's New with Healthy Mendocino!

We have hired two Action Team Coordinators for Inland and for the Coast! Our Inland Action Team Coordinator is Julie Fetherston. She will be working full time to support the Action Teams in Ukiah with their work on the five priority areas. Eventually she will bring this work up to Willits, Laytonville and Covelo. Julie grew up in Mendocino County and has a personal mission to help create resilient families and communities. She is excited about supporting the Action Teams to create change and improve the quality of life in Mendocino County. 

Thaïs Mazur, our past Project Manager for the CHIP work, will be the Coast Action Team Manager working with the Action Teams on the North and South Coast. Thaïs has been passionate about this work and helped get all the Action Teams focused on goals and objectives. She started the North Coast Action Teams and is working with the South Coast to establish a team for Childhood Trauma and Mental Health.

The Healthy Mendocino Steering Committee is looking forward to a facilitated meeting to redefine its vision. Our mission remains the same “to improve quality of life in Mendocino County by encouraging informed dialogue about the actions local residents and organizations can take to improve community health.” Healthy Mendocino’s original function was to be a data-based website and place for agencies to go for county wide health information. However, since starting the collaborative Community Health Needs Assessment (CHNA) in 2014 with the county, hospitals and other non-profit agencies, our work has also expanded to include being the lead on the ongoing Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP) and future CHNAs. We are looking to update our vision to reflect this larger role. This will help us with a long-term strategic plan, marketing, and help us build visibility in our community to further our common goals.

Patrice Mascolo, Program Manager, and Julie Fetherston, Inland Action Team Coordinator, attended the Healthy Communities Institute (HCI) Client Meeting in Berkeley recently. HCI is the company that operates the platform for the website. They maintain the data indicators, and give technical advice for website development. Patrice was asked to give a presentation on the work Healthy Mendocino has done with our collaborative work on the CHNA and CHIP. Healthy Mendocino is unique in that we were started by a volunteer network of county agencies and community members. Most other HCI clients are associated with county Public Health Departments or Hospitals. Most of the workshop participants did the CHNA/CHIP work for their agency, without cross agency cooperation. Hearing Patrice’s perspective on the benefits of forming a collaborative CHNA/CHIP with multiple agencies which include Public Health, Hospitals and other non-profits was informative. They especially enjoyed hearing about the efforts and methods used to distribute Community Health Surveys throughout the whole county. To obtain the demographics needed from the Latino and Tribal communities, low-income, and underserved, a raffle ticket was given to anyone filling out the survey to win a bike. AmeriCorps members helped to take the survey to areas throughout the county. The main take away of the presentation was working in partnership with agencies throughout a large geographically diverse county strengthens our ability to obtain more accurate data and increases our capacity to create collaborative solutions.