State of Our Health: Reflections and a Path Forward
Washtenaw Community College’s Morris Lawrence Building is wide and airy, sunlight filters through tall glass windows, casting long shadows across the hardwood floors. The event space is peppered with a rainbow of posters encircling the edges, each one dedicated to a specific health topic. The tables are adorned with crisp white cloth and meticulously stacked notecards for attendees to leave behind their thoughts, hopes, and wishes for the future of Washtenaw County. And thus, Morris Lawrence Building is the perfect home for the Washtenaw County Health Department’s State of Our Health event, a product of hundreds of hours of diligent data collection, research, meaningful collaboration, shared understanding, and mostly, a unique love and care for Washtenaw County’s community members.
More specifically, the State of Our Health event was intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the county’s Community Health Assessment (CHA). The CHA was carefully designed to hone in on the unmet health needs and little known cracks and fissures within current health policies and services Washtenaw County provides its residents with the goal of developing more effective, systematic strategies and novel solutions to improve overall health in the county.
The State of Our Health event presented a crucial juncture for the CHA. The findings, outcomes, and conclusions incurred from this event would hold critical implications for the next leg of the process, the Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP). The more than one hundred community members and partners who attended the event, ranging from Food Gatherers representatives to Educate Youth student advocates, were the cardinal decision makers, the ones to either level the playing field or tip the scale in determining the exact areas the Health Department would focus its improvement efforts towards for the next five years.
Given these high stakes, an overwhelming feeling of anticipation, excitement, and eagerness lingered in the building. The prospect of converting narratives, converting pain, love, and unique experiences into plans that could meaningfully change lives at both the macro and micro scale within the county, was enough to cultivate the sense that everyone in Morris Lawrence Building that evening, was dutifully a part of something big.
As the attendees filtered through the double doors, each was assigned rooms they would later break out into to provide group input regarding the CHA’s findings. The breakout rooms later emerged as the heart of the State of Our Health event, as counsel regarding the CHA’s analysis methods and outcomes quickly evolved into personal stories about food insecurity, education, and affordable housing. Stories about what it meant to teach in a school with faulty electricity and rust-addled pipes, what it meant to become evicted from your home, to have your entire life distilled in set of black garbage bags piled on the curb, what it meant to suffer from the throes of opioid addiction, and to rise, to recover, to heal again and again. The breakout rooms became a safe space for community members and local professionals alike to land, granting a profound depth to the CHA’s findings.
What the State of Our Health event brought forth was perhaps one of the most valuable conclusions regarding community engaged research, that is, the CHA is a living, breathing, ever-evolving data set. Behind every finding, every figure and every statistic is a complex, roaming, effervescent life, rendering the responsibility, mission, and goals of the Health Department as all the more gravely important.
As a college student and current intern at the Washtenaw County Health Department, I was able to bear witness to the incredible, months-long, diligent care, grace and planning that underscored the State of Our Health event. It was the result of what seemed like a million and one hands, and a million and one ideas, inputs, and discoveries. During the course of the event, I had the unique honor of participating in the breakout sessions, and occupying a space that existed at the intersection of both a county employee and a county community member. I sat next to individuals who had expertise and experiences ranging across a variety of backgrounds. On my right sat a woman who had delivered three babies earlier that day, on my left sat a woman who was solely responsible for managing the county’s federal and state budget, across from me sat a woman who had spent the entire morning on the phone with the local banks to prevent a family home from undergoing foreclosure. And even while the breakout session began to empty as attendees drifted away to dinner, our conversation continued to rapidly evolve, roaming from discussing the findings of the CHA to the specifics of their everyday lives, their jobs, the things they had seen on the ground across all corners of Washtenaw County, ultimately shedding light on gaps and disparities I had never thought possible.
The CHIP process now looms on the horizon and the key findings from the State of Our Health event are under dutiful analysis and aggregation to determine the three core health improvement initiatives Washtenaw County will augment and refine over the coming decade. The CHIP will help steer county health and social initiatives in the right direction. Most importantly, the CHIP came into fruition by virtue of community care and dialogue through the State of Our Health event, it is sustained by community meaning and understanding, and thus, serves as the critical guiding road map for county-wide and community change.