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Foundation seeks partners for grant By SUE WATSON
Staff Writer  | Photo by Sue Watson
Promoting health education
From
left are Lorena Adams, chair of the Marshall County Health Council;
Christine Philley, with the Mississippi Department of Education Office
of School Health; Judy Belue, with the Northwest Mississippi Community
Foundation; and Erma Rogers, accepting award for Dr. Norma Strickland
for promoting health education with ICS Head Start. |
Holly
Springs and Marshall County were in the spotlight recently as
professionals with the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi
recruited partners for its four-year grant application - “Healthy
Kids/Healthy Communities.” With 15 sites in the
nation funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Community
Foundation of Northwest Mississippi is one of the lucky 15. The area
foundation was a recent recipient of the “Get A Life” project that
fights childhood obesity, and the Healthy Congregation project which
included 600 congregations in North Mississippi, according to Peggy
Linton. She is responsible for pulling together the Partners and
Pathways for a Healthy Community - a new four-year grant the
organization hopes to receive. “We are
concentrating on the Upper Coldwater River Watershed - that is what we
are calling ‘our community,’ ” Linton said at a meeting with members of
the Holly Springs Main Street, Strawberry Plains Audubon, the Holly
Springs Chamber of Commerce, and local elected officials and friends of
the community, including Rust College. DeSoto,
Marshall and Tate counties in North Mississippi will contain the
community. The Partners and Pathways to Healthier Communities, that
seeks to reduce childhood obesity through healthy eating and living,
will promote availability of healthy foods by establishing community
gardens and farmers markets. Healthy activities are to be supported
through the use of greenway/bike/walking plans and trails. Education
of the residents of the community is an integral part of the project
because the community is where the healthy eating/living begins and
ends. It is an at-home, in-community, and community-built and supported
initiative. Local governmental bodies have been asked to become
involved in creating and carrying out the four goals for the four-year
proposed project. Goal #1 asks the community
to determine what it wants to do as a partner and will determine
policies and environmental changes it wants to implement. This goal is
included in the six-month planning process to develop and implement a
community assessment. Goal #2 involves education
and training of the community on policies and environmental changes
that will lead to active living and healthy eating. These changes can
include greenways/trails, joint use agreements between organizations
like schools and the community, development of complete streets and
safe routes to schools, encouraging corner stores to participate in
offering healthy fruits, and organizing farmers markets and community
gardens. Goal #3 is to develop “greenways”
(trails and parks) and “blueways” (waterways) and trails, and plans to
include healthy eating and active living components. Goal #4 creates an
evaluation process to meet the program requirements for the national
grant office. This grant proposes to get
governments to put in policies and environmental changes that will
support healthy eating/living and therefore the Community Foundation
will seek to obtain memoranda of understanding with governing bodies in
the three-county area that support the program’s desired outcomes. In
working with youth and adult outcomes, the project would provide safe
sidewalks for children to walk to school instead of ride, would promote
healthy snacks, the production and sale of less expensive and more
nutritious fruits and vegetables. With farmer’s markets already established in Tate and DeSoto counties, Marshall County would be a target to add one. Some
communities, for example, have zoned out fast-food restaurants, said
Shelly Johnstone, evaluation liaison for the project. Enforcement of
zoning ordinances is not uniform in Southern communities, she noted. “How
policies are enforced may differ,” she said. “Ordinances may collect
dust (on the shelf) or may be ignored or partly enforced. When a
community adopts an ordinance, that means somebody has to abide by it.” To
encourage healthy living (activity), communities may adopt ordinances
to require sidewalks in industrial areas, at churches, and in other
areas. “Writing an ordinance is easy,” Johnstone said. “Getting it implemented is a political act.” For
example, getting sidewalks in areas that typically have lacked them may
require ordinances that industries and residential areas pay for
building them. “Sidewalks, trails, city parks,
sharing school facilities - these are the environmental infrastructure
policies and sites (in the proposal),” she said. Johnstone
commended Holly Springs’ Main Street plan for making the city a walking
city and encouraging people to walk downtown rather than drive around. “Active living is a part of these goals, already,” she said. Because
Holly Springs has not experienced rapid growth and urban sprawl, it
will be easier now to develop walking and biking trails and include
them in the design standards of the city, Johnstone said. “All cities in Marshall County have a good pattern of that,” she said. Linton
added that Strawberry Plains Audubon and the community of Hudsonville
have already established walking trails and means to protect land and
water resources. “These fit into the tourism picture, and are not only good for the eye, but for body and soul, too,” she said. Another
way to discourage a lot of asphalt, which encourages parking lots and
driving around, is to set design standards to bring buildings closer to
the street. “You have trees and it is a lot
easier to walk by,” Linton said. “It is not just infrastructure, but
design, too, that attracts people (to downtown).” The
Coldwater River Watershed project will help promote blueways for
boating and kayaking from the headwaters to Arkabutla Lake. Cleaning of
the Coldwater has already increased recreational use such as kayaking,
Linton said. “If you do the right things, it is
going to hit all the healthy things,” she said and added a quote, “You
make it simple and easy enough for people to do and they are going to
do it.” Making it easy for people to make healthy
food choices can include a simple measure such as a grocers putting
fruit and vegetables near the checkout counter instead of potato chips
and candy, Linton said. “We are not the experts,” she added. “We want to be the resource.” |
