COPE makes significant impact on community in 2 years
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By ROBERT PIERCE
• Leader & Times
Born from the COVID-19 pandemic, the KU Medical Center’s Communities Organizing to Promote Equity (COPE) program is funded through a two-year grant from the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the Centers for Disease Control’s national initiative to address health disparities in high-risk and underserved communities.
COPE utilizes Local Health Equity Action Teams (LHEAT) working closely with community health workers to identify needs and build trust and report and establish partnerships and deploy tailored interventions for community members experiencing health inequities.
Clarissa Carrillo, LHEAT Regional Community Leader for Western Kansas, said the program, which recently finished its second year has been a great opportunity to form teams in communities. She added teams are made up of any community members, not just those with titles attached to their name.
“It can just be a community member wanting to talk about their life experiences, also any organizations or stakeholders,” she said. “We need to recognize the organizations that are already doing the work.”
Carrillo said voices need to be heard, and people need to be connected to resources in order to reduce inequities. She likewise said local LHEATs initially received $40,000 for two years, but an extension was given on the project.
“We were able to continue the work even after the two years,” she said. “With that, we also got an additional $10,000. There were guidelines and rules. We couldn’t use the funds to purchase food directly. That really worked to push the teams to think more upstream. How can we get creative and utilize partnerships and what we already have to make the community better?”
In Seward County, LHEATs successfully established valuable partnerships to address community barriers from food access to emergency services to creating events that provided learning and advancement opportunities for community members.
With this, though, Carrillo said challenges came with food insecurity due to the fact grant money could not be used to purchase food.
“What can we do? If we can’t purchase food to make more food boxes, what’s another way we can help to make sure there’s food access for the community?” she said.
After some thought, however, some solutions were found to that problem.
“Some of the food pantries couldn’t take a lot of donations because they didn’t have the freezer to be able to keep it,” Carrillo said. “The LHEAT was like ‘We can invest funds in buying a freezer.’ We ended up purchasing around three freezers or refrigerators. One was for South Church of God. I think another one was for the Southern Baptist church, and there was another one that was purchased.”
Carrillo said she was most proud of the work LHEAT members did during recent weather emergencies.
“There was a time during the cold weather when it got really bad,” she said. “There was collaboration with the shelter. We knew the shelter didn’t have the capacity to take everyone in. The LHEAT was able to use funds to help people being put up at the shelter, being able to offer a stay at one of the motels to make sure no one was out in the freezing temperatures. Also the LHEAT used funds to purchase bedding and blankets for the shelter to make sure they had those available for people.”
An LHEAT also led a project at Sage Mobile Home Park on Bluebell Road to clean up after a tornado in 2023.
“We invited people from the community,” Carrillo said. “The college brought students. It was neat for us to go out and do a cleanup. It’s been a lot of different activities.”
LHEATs likewise offered financial literacy classes through a partnership with local banks.
“We had three local banks come out and were part of the workshop,” Carrillo said. “It was a lot of teaching. What are the resources when it comes to buying a home for the first time, tips on how to take care of your credit score?”
With the COPE grant focused on COVID, Carrillo said teams had the flexibility to focus on mental health. She added with resources being limited, partnerships, volunteers, feedback and life experiences were a necessary part of what it took to make everything happen in such a short amount of time.
“What are the needs in the community?” she said. “We had the budget there. We had funding there. Now, we can take action steps, but what are the main needs in our community? From there, it was also trying to be very creative on what we can do. Let’s not just put a band-aid on the problem.”
Carrillo oversees much of the work the COPE grant allowed for in Western Kansas. She said about 20 counties in the state have LHEATs, including a few in Western Kansas – Seward County, Grant County, Finney County, Ford County, Sherman County and Thomas County.
Despite being responsible for such a large area, Carrillo said she was excited to do all of the work while being based primarily in Seward County.
“For me, it was a pleasure because I got to work with my community,” she said. “The invitation was out there for people to come join and be part of the conversations, but sometimes, it’s hard to bring people in. It was a lot of building relationships, inviting people, bringing in organizations. It’s not reinventing the wheel, but growing the capacity of what we already have here.”
A Liberal native, Carrillo said she enjoys the rural nature of Western Kansas, and she likewise enjoys being able to work in her hometown and county.
“It’s been wonderful to not necessarily focus on my community, but also go out into our region into counties,” she said. “Every community is unique, and every community is different.”
Carrillo said barriers are not only happening in Seward County, but all over the state, and she said it was nice to see other communities, learn from them and bring ideas back from those towns.
“Our community is different,” she said. “It’s unique, but can we apply any of these strategies, ideas or plans and adjust it to our community. I got to take ideas from here to other counties, and I was to able to bring ideas from other counties to our LHEAT.”
Carrillo said the KU Med Center has great people who keep Southwest Kansas in mind with grants such as COPE, and she said projects will continue to happen even as the grant has come to an end.
“It’s going to be focused on nutrition, physical activity and breastfeeding,” she said. “The LHEATs now will go under a different grant, which is called REACH.”
The new Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health grant will also come from the CDC, and Carrillo said while COPE was broad in its scope, REACH will specifically target nutrition, physical activity and breastfeeding.
As for the legacy two years of work will leave, Carrillo said COPE allows community leaders to plant seeds and have conversations in continued hopes of progress.
“We are aware there are some big barriers,” she said. “Even if we had 10 years, we might still not be able to completely fix the problem, but our hope is to at least leave that little seed behind that is going to help our communities to take a step to become better and make progress in those barriers. More than anything, it’s being able to know with the conversation, some of the action steps will have and have had an impact in the community.”
Carrillo said while some may look at providing a freezer to a food panty a minor item, it means so much more to those who are part of LHEATS and those who benefit from the work the teams do.
“You’re helping us to be able to give out more food boxes or be able to receive more donations to give out more food boxes, and that’s affecting families directly,” she said. “Their work is making progress in the community.”
Community health workers were a large part of COPE, and while the REACH grant will likely only alow for one community health worker, Carrillo said there was something special about the COPE grant and having multiple community health workers.
“We had employees who were helping clients directly, making sure they knew about resources we had in the community,” she said. “That was very impactful from the community workers side. They were able to help and serve several clients. They were able to serve those clients, and that means those clients could have barriers in their life, but those CHWs were able to walk with them by their side and help them connect with resources directly.”
Carrillo said the hope when the COPE grant started was to be able to do strategies or take action steps and not just provide temporary fixes.
“It would be something that would be sustainable and have a long lasting impact,” she said. “I believe when it comes to providing opportunities of education or creating awareness of awareness, it does make a long lasting impact. When people know about what’s out there, it can make a difference, especially when they’re going through difficulties.”
Carrillo said COPE provided opportunities in education that will community members in the long term, and providing items such as freezers will have a lasting impact as well.
“It will be there for years,” she said.
Carrillo said the work of the COPE grant will provide long lasting affects to people and make a lifetime of difference in their lives.
“We know some of the things will be there for years, and that’s the beauty of it,” she said. “Some of the actions will be there for a long time and continue to impact people, not just for one day, but hopefully for years to come.”