Photo Credit: Courtesy David Weed, Fall River Healthy City Coordinator
The Healthy City Fall River initiative engages local citizens in healthy activity designed to improve the quality of life in the city.
Better Health - from the Grassroots Up?
By Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson
Can better health for New Englanders bubble up from the grassroots, community levels-- rather than from organized medicine?
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Check with David Weed, the psychologist who helped to spark creation of Partners for a Healthy Community in Fall River, Mass., and that’s precisely the conclusion you reach.
Fall River’s need is crystal clear. Once a prospering “needle trade” city, it suffered a body blow from flight of textiles to the South. Present-day Fall River is still plagued by high unemployment, high poverty, a negative self-image, and Massachusetts’s third highest heart attack rate, third highest asthma rate and high and rising levels of obesity and diabetes.
But Weed and his allies perceived other potentials -- volunteer interest, a great place to raise a family, and a passion for kids doing sports -- not just watching. From the mid-’90s on they asked city government to start a “healthy city” organization, akin to movements sprouting in cities across the U.S. In 2003, on the occasion of Fall River’s 200th anniversary, Mayor Edward Lambert agreed and Fall River’s Partners for a Healthy City Fall River was launched.
Photo: David Weed Fall River Mayor Edward M.
Lambert, Jr., joins children as they dance at one of the City's summer festivals that invite residents to join in healthy fun activities.
Today, Fall River is the poster child of healthy community efforts supported by Massachusetts’ Department of Public Health. To start, over 1,000 residents participated in visioning sessions to select Fall Rivers’ top goals -- safety and reducing substance abuse, the environment, recreation and health education topping the list. So far some 98 supporting activities have been identified, many helped by $500 “micro-grants” to get neighborhood initiatives rolling.
The main focus, says Weed, isn’t on such targeted health activities as blood pressure screening or smoking cessation. Instead, it’s to connect to and expand Fall River’s often unheralded asset base. Under the media radar, the Police Athletic League was running a floor hockey league with several hundred children, boys and girls, ages 6 to 16, involved four nights a week and Saturdays in vigorous physical activity. Healthy Communities celebrated that effort. When the local diabetes association wanted to get adults into more physical activity, Healthy Communities supported a popular ballroom dancing teaching effort.
Coalitions and partnerships are the name of the game, says Weed: “Other than drug dealers and fast food restaurants, there’s practically no organization we aren’t open to working with.”
Photo: David Weed A city-sponsored walk along Fall River's new
boardwalk brings dozens of people out each year.
One major target: getting local high schools to think beyond team sports to focus on life-long health practices for all students, including a cardiovascular assessment of all sophomores with recommendations on how to improve their numbers. Team sports obsession is dangerous, says Weed: “You can easily end up with a few dozen players working out hard while 90 percent of kids pork up on soda while watching the games.”
A quick glance across New England reveals a variety of standout healthy community programs. Vermont’s five-year-old Champlain Initiative is pledged to “bend” back such unhealthy trends as disturbing local levels of obesity, poor nutrition and eating habits and sedentary lifestyles -- critical factors in high local levels of diabetes and heart disease. The Franklin Community Health Network, in one of Maine’s most depressed rural counties, has focused hard on anti-smoking efforts (especially among young mothers and families) and now can claim Maine’s lowest smoking rate.
Connecticut reports strong initiatives in such communities as New London, Meriden, Bridgeport, New Haven and Danbury. “Healthy Valley 2000,” a program coordinated by Griffin Hospital to enhance health across the six-town Naugatuck Valley, led to the valley winning one of the ten highly-coveted All-America City awards from the National Civic League in 2000.
Photo: Foundation for Healthy Communities
Kids at the Whitefield School walked one mile as part of New Hampshire's Foundation
for Healthy Communities "Walk NH" initiative. New Hampshire’s Foundation for Healthy Communities has initiated a “Walk NH” program to encourage kids 6 to 12 to walk the equivalent of the state’s length (190 miles) or width (70 miles) as a way to get in shape for life, an antidote to the sedentary pastimes of TV, video games or Internet surfing. Rhode Island has an Initiative for Healthy Eating and Active Living designed to cut back sharply on the 56 percent of Rhode Islanders reported overweight or obese.
Across the region, interest in farmers’ markets and locally grown fresh foods is mounting. Former Massachusetts Agriculture Secretary Gus Schumacher spots a promising trend in new prepaid contracts between local farmers and schools, universities, hospitals, government cafeterias and restaurants -- a way to deliver economic security to imperiled small producers.
Healthy communities initiatives across the country embrace all these trends-- exercise, healthier foods, civic activity, and replanning towns and regions for enhanced walking opportunities. Rare is the New England community in which at least one effort isn’t underway.
But is it all enough? David Weed worries not: “Too many of us still don’t have a good conception of what good prevention is all about. We look toward the experts to ‘fix’ things. We’re good at ‘fixes.’ But so good the health system is costing 14 percent of our gross national product. The trends are killing us -- financially, and literally.”
The answer? Partly, Weed agrees, it’s better personal health decisions. But without civic involvement, building on community assets, he suggests, we’ll never succeed.