Upper Valley Community Health Equity Partnership

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In March 2022, the Public Health Council signed on as the Backbone Organization for the Upper Valley Community Health Equity Partnership (UVCHEP), on behalf of the White River Junction District Office of the Vermont Department of Health. The project was funded through a US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control (CDC) grant awarded to the Vermont Department of Health (VDH) to “mobilize partners and collaborators to advance health equity and address social determinants of health as they relate to COVID-19 health disparities among populations at higher risk and that are underserved.”

The grant allowed us to bring on temporary staff to manage the project, engage local partners, and design a community-grants process. We recruited local people with personal understanding of health disparities and inequity to steer the project, providing insights, connections, and making decisions about the use of grant resources. Finally, the grant provided funds – ultimately $168,000 – for community grants that addressed a data-driven problem identified by our Steering Committee.

The UVCHEP Community Goal/Vision: The Upper Valley is a lively, growing, safe, and inclusive community where, by working together, marginalized communities have access to the power and resources necessary to ensure equitable access to health care, education, housing, food security, and other socioeconomic needs.

The UVCHeP Data Driven Problem Statement: Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as well as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual and plus (LGBTQIA+) community members have higher levels of mental health challenges and substance use disorder, diagnosed and undiagnosed. These conditions are both caused by and contribute to isolation, other chronic health conditions, and not feeling safe.

Between October 2022 and January 2023, the Steering Committee invited two rounds of grant applications, with the goal of reducing the barriers that traditionally prevent groups and organizations most closely connected to the people who experience health disparities from getting funding and other resources to address health disparities in their own communities. The Steering Committee selected ten (10) organizations to receive grants ranging roughly from $6,000 to $35,000. The grant period ran from December 2022 through November 2023, with some variation in project dates.

We are pleased to share the community projects with our community. Below are summaries of each of the organizations and projects. We have provided links to other sources of information when available. In a few cases, we have provided links to additional posts that the projects created to tell their own story.

Abenaki Garden
The Abenaki Garden project is providing food, teaching Abenaki gardening, culture and history in the Upper Valley. Planning began 2 years ago, and work started at the garden in August 2022 to prepare the space for winter and plant some trees and bushes. The “Abenaki Garden” project presents traditional Abenaki agriculture to the public. Utilizing food source trees, berries, herbs and vegetable varieties native and cultivated for thousands of years in Vermont, the garden recreates the concept of N’dakinna (New England) before 1492. A Fire Circle also creates a place for Abenaki speakers to tell stories, teach Abenaki culture and perform public ceremonies for public education events. Inspiration to create this space came upon reading a plea from an Abenaki Chief asking folks with land and gardens to take their gifts of ancient seeds and grow them to share the food with the tribe because they had lost all their land and needed the food. Thus, the true purpose of this project is to grow food for the Abenaki Peoples. Seeds for the project are donated by Abenaki Bands. Funds helped buy materials to construct the fencing, build a rain barrel watering system, compost, trees, bushes, and supplies. More about the Abenaki Garden.

AthletaFit
AthletaFit provides an online 8-week strength training program through the Trainerize app, with the support of a trainer with experience of the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ community. Grant funding allowed the grantee to develop marketing and outreach to members of the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities in the Upper Valley. AthletaFit seeks to address the health disparities of higher levels of mental health challenges and substance use disorder by reducing isolation and improving chronic health conditions among these underserved populations. Look for VT AthletaFit on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/VTAthletaFit

Community Resilience Organizations
Community Resilience Organizations of Vermont (CROs) support grassroots community organizing by people most likely to be harmed by and marginalized by large scale emergencies, such as Hurricane Irene and the COVID pandemic. CROs’ programs support the health and wellbeing of grassroots organizers in underserved, marginalized communities, and scales them up with a concerted geographical focus. As part of this grant, CROs built out their Community Wellness Program and Grassroots Organizing Hub in the White River Junction area with programs designed for BIPOC, LGBTQA, and other marginalized grassroots organizers. The goal is twofold: 1) to offer “community wellness gifts” to marginalized and unpaid organizers who experience burn-out or trauma as a result of their work and 2) to engage with new healing practitioners in providing these gift services as paid for by CROs. More about CROs.

Liberation Library (Every Town)
The Liberation Library is a space for BIPOC in the Upper Valley to gather, create, learn, and share. The library offers books, tools, art supplies and digital resources on loan at no cost and also serves as a gathering place for events, performances, craft shows and more and will be a model shared with other communities. The Liberation Library strengthens several current partnerships with New England Farmers of Color’s (NEFOC) Every Town project. For example, Vermont Releaf Collective members have access to all programming. With over 260 Releaf members, a large concentration of whom are in the Upper Valley, this serves as a central gathering and sharing place for members of this virtual BIPOC Vermonters collective. The Neighbors Network holds anti-oppression book groups and skill shares, increasing the number and quality of anti-oppression trainings and skill shares available in the area as well as increasing conversation about race and the associated awareness and solidarity in our communities and Just Construction, a collective of volunteer carpenters, offers free building and tool safety classes. You can learn more about the Liberation Library at Vermont Public and about the NEFOC at: https://nefoclandtrust.org/.

One Heart Wellness Cooperative
One Heart Wellness Cooperative is a cooperative local space where member organizations and individuals can enjoy and offer quality, accessible, holistic practices, products, and services. Leadership is diverse and committed to providing space for affinity groups to host programs created by and for their communities. The cooperative also serves as an incubator space for small business development, including BIPOC and LGBTQIA+-owned businesses. As a cooperative, One Heart Wellness is owned and operated by the membership with a goal of ensuring membership fees are not a barrier to joining. More about One Heart Wellness.

Safe Spaces for BIPOC
Safe Spaces creates space for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) and Aspiring White Allies to connect, learn, and heal as we fight for our collective liberation. Safe Spaces strengthens individuals, communities, as well as institutions, businesses, and agencies through creating partnerships with other established racial justice organizations to provide guidance, resources, and physical and figurative space to work through systematic, systemic, and institutional prejudice and racism. Program offerings include: BIPOC Youth Programs (Read It & Eat it, Jol Indaba), Family Programs (Soul Food Programs, Game Nights), Adult Programs (BIPOC Women’s Group, Social Club), and special events from covering topics such as Mental Health in the BIPOC community during Winter months, BIPOC Women in Jazz and the Arts, and Growing Financial Literacy in the BIPOC Community. Learn more about Safe Spaces for BIPOC at: https://www.safespaces4.org/.

Storytelling Events for BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+
Murphy Barney hosted virtual community storytelling and listening events designed for the Upper Valley to honor and share the healthcare-related experiences of BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ individuals. The events were in the style of town halls, but the storytellers were community members. Murphy generated the Health Equity Storytelling Report from the events that anonymously summarizes the experiences of storytellers and provides local healthcare providers and decision makers with a roadmap for improving services to BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ community members. By hosting community storytelling events, healthcare institutions receive clear guidance enabling them to provide compassionate, culturally informed, equitable health services. When healthcare institutions listen to the stories of their communities, policies begin to reflect the expressed needs of those they serve. More about Murphy Barney and the storytelling events.

Telling My Story
Telling my story hosted three intensive workshops (14 hours over three days) with mental health providers and community members in the Upper Valley that addressed the urgent need for mental health providers to expand awareness and cultural competency with respect to BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities and individuals.  Telling My Story workshops were aimed at increasing the cultural competencies, equity orientation, and overall accessibility of mental health providers towards marginalized people. “We do not expect to be able to educate providers on every element of the experience of being marginalized. Rather, we hope to instill awareness of privilege, power, the need to listen, and the need to act to build a more just society.” More about Telling My Story.

Unlikely Riders
Unlikely Riders brings folks together to break and reduce a sense of isolation, foster community connection and conversation, and improve mental wellbeing through investing and supporting BIPOC and LGBTQIA community members with no cost access to winter recreation, education and resources. The grant supported Upper Valley events like community ski and ride days allowing members to ski and ride at no cost, including community instruction and gear (winter layers and snow gear). Our intention through this programming is for folks to be in affinity to build joyful and fulfilling relationships with outdoor spaces and winter in Vermont, New Hampshire, and the Upper Valley. Our work is often in places (ski areas) that have historically been exclusive, inaccessible, and unwelcoming to Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, poor and working-class people, and queer and trans BIPOC folks. Our organization is rooted in creating long-term belonging, healing, and joy through relationship building with winter, snow recreation, and outdoor movement and our leadership is currently all LGBTQIA+ BIPOC folks, two of whom grew up in the Upper Valley area. Learn more about Unlikely Riders at: https://www.unlikelyriders.com/.

Windsor Central Supervisory Union (WCSU)

Windsor Central Supervisory Union Queer-Straight Alliance QSA grant
Student members of Woodstock Middle School/High School’s Queer Straight Alliance (QSA) designed and hosted a Queer Prom open to students at several nearby schools. The dance provided a safe, happy experience for students who might otherwise not attend such events and allowed them to make a typical high school experience uniquely their own. The event’s goals were to decrease isolation and loneliness and increase a sense of belonging, worth, and self-respect. Mental health and LGBT+ service providers also staffed booths and tables at the dance, helping to connect students to resources that can support their mental and physical health long past the event itself. By building relationships with other schools in the region, the hope is that this can become an annual event with shared responsibility for planning.

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The Public Health Council has been honored to participate in this work over the past few years. We hope the Upper Valley will rally around the people and organizations who have taken this opportunity to build programming to address the isolation and discrimination experienced by too many of our neighbors. By supporting this work, we make our communities stronger and healthier.

Abenaki Garden

Abenaki Garden

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This garden is situated on land in the Upper Valley that has been home to the Abenaki people for thousands of years. The name of this place means “where the land falls” and within this sacred gorge, we are creating a place to grow the Seven Sisters: Sunflowers, Squash, Corn, Beans, Tobacco, Jerusalem Artichoke, and Chokecherry. We are creating a place to gather, to dance, to tell stories, to host ceremonies, and to continue living in right-relationship with this land for generations to come. We will plant seeds that have been growing here for thousands of years, and that continue to grow in reciprocity with the needs of the land we are tending to. We hope to be able to cultivate and share these seeds widely, as well as sharing the produce with Abenaki families in need, in an effort to heal the land beyond our garden through responsible cultivation of the plants that are integral to the health of our people and local ecosystem.

Abenaki Garden

We are also establishing a food forest where nourishing native foods and herbs can thrive, and, in turn, contribute to the thriving of our community. It has been wonderful to see which foods and plants are already growing in the forest and marsh that we can continue to nurture and cultivate. As we tend to this land, we are also tending to our community through education and sharing stories and traditional agricultural practices with people from all walks of life. Our vision is for this to be a place that all generations can come together and learn from each other, to learn that the Abenaki are still here and eager to teach their traditional knowledge in this time of uncertainty and we want this to be available for generations to come.

Abenaki GardenThere is so much wisdom in our community about this land and what plants can both nurture and be nurtured by this land. Right now, we are in the building phase of this garden, which is a really exciting place to be. We will have a rain collection system installed to sustainably water our plants. Our Board of Directors is Abenaki lead, and we have plans to hire an Abenaki manager for the garden and are currently fundraising to support that person’s work. Our efforts are also centered on finding other sources of sustainable funding, in addition to the funding from VTCHEP that allowed us to purchase some of the initial building materials to make this plan into a physical reality.

Indigenous food sovereignty and community spaces are integral to our health and wellbeing, and the ripple effects are significant. When we have access to land, we have access to sustenance and to an affirming, culturally grounded place to gather and support each other.

Community Resilience Organizations - CROs - watch the video

Community Resilience Organizations

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Community Resilience Organizations – lovingly called CROs – was born from the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene in 2011. As we watched the response to Irene, we recognized that those most impacted by climate disasters and climate change should be supported by a justice-oriented grassroots organizing hub. So, we built one. We work with individuals, organizations, and coalitions to build networks of care and repair that center the frontline communities most impacted by climate change. We know that we cannot build climate refuge without the leadership of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), trans, queer, disabled, neurodivergent, low-income, survivors, and undocumented people.

Our work of building climate refuge is centered on five pillars, all in service of building a social fabric of alternative systems and networks of care and repair. These pillars are: managing a Grassroots Organizing Hub for aligned, anti-oppression, climate justice projects; Community Wellness Program; coalition building and convening; creation of community networks; and stewardship of the Community Resilience Assessment. You can learn more about each of these pillars here.

In 2023, with funding from VTCHEP, we expanded our Community Wellness Program offering. These wellness gifts were created to make a diversity of healing modalities available to the community caregivers and organizers from marginalized identities. We want to ensure that the people doing work on the frontlines of the climate crisis response in Vermont have access to whole-person care including acupuncture, Chinese medicine, massage, herbalism, sound healing, and other modalities. We have seen time and time again the impact of taking care of frontline responders through affirming, flexible health services. CROs takes an expansive approach to defining “resilience” and we feel this offering is central to building a sustainable movement for our people, and for the planet.

In a time of acute stress following this summer’s flooding, the Community Wellness Program connected a Black community organizer with free Black hair services in preparation for a professional opportunity. This organizer felt confident and had a functional hair style for the coming weeks.

We also offered vouchers to a regional BIPOC affinity group that was able to share the gifts with the members and volunteers in their multiracial organizing efforts.

Finally, during this busy and disruptive summer, one of our networks’ Eastern Medicine practitioners was able to offer free and sliding scale appointments to patients who were otherwise unable to pay for follow-up treatments.
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Our organization was founded during a crisis to better prepare our communities for future crises. Since we first came together, we have watched the needs of our community grow and change, and we strive to be a flexible, reliable, climate-justice organization that can meet those growing and changing needs. We have been a thought and action partner through a pandemic, political unrest, continued systemic violence against communities, and climate catastrophes. We are here to ensure the leaders, doers, and dreamers of grassroots projects are able to focus their energy on direct services, training programs, and community building while we handle the financial, legal, and administrative operations.

Telling My Story Workshop

Telling Our Story

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Telling My Story is an exploration of our shared humanity through the use of the arts, storytelling, and performance. We have worked with many communities including people incarcerated, immigrant women, women in recovery from substance use, students, and many more. By bringing disconnected communities together, we work to break down visible and invisible social walls. We strive to create a space in which participants can face and embrace the truth of our collective realities to nurture a possibilitarian spirit. We cultivate trust by taking leaps of faith with one another, deconstructing the social walls that separate us so we can build the spaces we long for. The walls will appear and disappear, but our critical presence will confront them and resist them. Doing and being together are the engines for listening and speaking with a more daring, liberating, and refreshing conscience. Maybe that is what a leap of faith really is?

We are excited to be starting a new chapter of our work. What used to take place in a classroom at Dartmouth, is now available to the broader community. For this change, we are training Telling My Story facilitators. Our hope is to create more spaces for public discussion about the root causes of seemingly intractable social issues and the impacts on individuals, families, and the larger community.

Listening is an integral part of impactful storytelling. It is rare that we truly listen to each other, however, when we do, transformation is possible. Our hope is that our work will help participants strengthen their voice and deepen the quality of their listening. Our hope is that they share their stories and honor the stories of others. This is crucial in the world we live in, as we each need to better understand our role in transforming social structures to serve everyone.

Telling My Story WorkshopEarlier this year, we received funding from VTCHEP to adapt our Telling My Story program into two workshops for BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ community members and health providers to tell their stories about navigating health systems in the Upper Valley. As long as we have existed, we have worked to ensure our model is adaptable and can be used to tell stories from any perspective. This proved to be true in our work with the community in the Upper Valley. We hope to see the ripple effects of these workshops spread far and wide and lead to increased trust and understanding between our BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ community members and the health systems that are responsible for serving them. We have seen time and time again how our model creates connections and strengthens advocacy, and this was another example of the power of true human connection through storytelling, and also through doing, creating and imagining together, which highlights the importance of being with others with the intention of connecting to build stronger and more nurturing communities. We don’t want people to fit in in our community; we want us all to feel we belong.

Telling My Story 3One of our participants said the following about taking part in TMS programming: I had the pleasure of participating in TMS twice, as a participant member of a marginalized group and as an activist for a group; both experiences were life changing. TMS gives participants the opportunity to feel pain, frustration, joy, and even anger in a safe supportive environment. TMS also provides a very visual representation of the immense privileges we have in all different spaces. I love the community presentation portion of the program for this very reason…it brings visibility to the invisible, allows light to shine in the dark places of our communities and towns!

Telling My StoryAnother participant shared their experience: I have attended two TMS workshops, one online and another in-person. Both experiences were life changing. Imagine a group of about a dozen strangers who come from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds for the purpose of addressing a social justice topic. Under Pati’s guidance we begin opening our hearts and minds to each other through various exercises. Our original shyness gives way to a shared sense of belongingness and purpose. This culminates in a public performance where each of us finds the courage to speak our truths in defiance of the many obstacles of poverty, racism, political division, homelessness, and fear. We all need a TMS experience to believe that social justice is possible when enough people speak truth to power.

At the core, we are building new and radically inclusive communities. Through the act of being and doing with others, we learn about ourselves and cultivate our critical awareness and compassionate presence in society. We look forward to this next adventure and are excited to see the Upper Valley community take part in this important, transformational work.

www.tellingmystory.org

https://www.instagram.com/tellingmystoryvt/

One Heart Wellness - watch the video

One Heart Wellness Cooperative

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One Heart Wellness believes that every moment is an opportunity to choose wellness and balance and find harmony. We are a health cooperative that works in Windsor, Vermont – and surrounding areas – to provide whole person care in the form of: yoga, martial arts, dancing, massage, acupuncture, meditation, nutrition counseling, discussion groups and a constantly evolving list of other offerings. In the seven years since we first started, our offerings have shifted to meet the needs of the community – something that we will continue to do for as long as we exist.

The story of our cooperative is filled with serendipity and meaningful connections, and we hope to weave those connections throughout the community we serve in order to create a resilient, healthful, loving space for all. Our new space in Windsor, Vermont creates more opportunities for our community to participate in our offerings. We have had people seek out bodywork services here, as well as others who stop by for a warm meal and a chance to connect with others.

We want to make sure we are honoring the diversity of our community, while also coming together in unity to care for each other in this turbulent world. That is why we operate as a cooperative that welcomes people to share their gifts with the community in the ways that feel most connective and collective. We leave it to our community to define what wellness means to them, creating an expansive view of how this space can be used and what gifts can be offered here.

Following the floods in Vermont this summer, we started a weekly benefit concert series that takes place on Fridays. These gatherings have vendors and are potluck-style. Some of our practitioners and artists also take part.

We really believe that everyone who shows up to One Heart Wellness belongs here, and that we have as much to learn from you as you have to learn from us. We want to hear about your ideas and hopes for this space. We hope to see you and your loved ones – of all ages – here someday soon.