Health POWER projects
Here are the incredible PSE changes*, and difference makers the Health POWER funded organizations accomplished, furthering the health of communities, and showcasing the power of investing in community-based solutions.
*Refresher on PSE Change
- ‘P’ is for Policy interventions that can happen through laws, ordinances, resolutions, mandates, regulations or rules.
- ‘S’ is for Systems interventions that can impact the rules of an organization, institution or system.
- ‘E’ is for Environmental interventions that involve changes to the physical environment.
American Lung Association (ALA): The Lung Mind Alliance
Through the Lung Mind Alliance coalition, the ALA worked to reduce in equities in commercial tobacco use within the behavioral health system. Their efforts focused on increasing the number of mental health and substance use disorder treatment organizations that implement tobacco treatment and tobacco-free grounds.
In total, ALA supported 12 organizations to write a commercial tobacco treatment protocol, training over 1,300 staff and more than 40,000 clients in the protocols. They also helped make impactful systems and environment changes by supporting nine organizations to write their own commercial tobacco-free grounds policy.
The policy lever, so important in commercial tobacco work was also positively activated, with ALA successfully advocating for the Minnesota Tobacco Treatment Bill- that expands the type of providers that can reimburse for providing tobacco treatments. This legislation went into effect on January 1, 2024.
Appetite For Change (AFC)
Appetite for Change supported youth in North Minneapolis to grow as community leaders and food justice advocates. Youth participating in the Youth Training & Opportunity Program (YTOP) program worked to increase access to healthy food in the community, develop community organizing skills, and advocate for policy change related to healthy eating.
Forging the next generation of changemakers, AFC youth engaged with policymakers and were part of testifying for the Healthy, Hunger Free Schools Initiative that successfully passed in 2023. In addition, AFC opened the West Broadway Farmers Market, the only farmers market in the state operated and staffed by youth.
Communidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio (CLUES)
As part of their Health POWER initiative, CLUES developed the Jardín de Armonía En Acción, a multi-generational community garden in East Side St. Paul. The community garden brought together 43 families to grow fresh, healthy, and culturally relevant food. The garden also included 14 production plots to supply fresh produce to CLUES’ emergency food program.
Using the garden as a focal engagement and empowerment space, CLUES brought together community members creating an action cohort that advocated for policy change related to food access. In addition, gardeners developed a one of a kind Spanish-language vegetable growing guide. Jardín de Armonía En Acción has had a lasting impact on the health and wellbeing of community members and is now entirely community-led and operated.
FamilyWise
FamilyWise- an organization that seeks to strengthen families by promoting the safety, stability, and wellbeing of children, used their funding to increased community understanding and awareness of NEAR (Neurobiology, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Resilience) science to build self-healing communities. Through their project, they developed programs rooted in Indigenous traditions for community members to engage in self-healing.
The project also sort to create narrative change and start healing dialogues for the community, creating the Remembering Resilience podcast, a three-season series that addresses historical trauma, healing, and resilience in Indigenous communities, along with accompanying discussion guides and conversations. The podcast and guides served as a perfect companion to the 17 Self-Healing Communities educational workshops they built that engaging with 1,051 individuals.
Hmong American Farmers Association (HAFA)
HAFA’s work is grounded in strong communitarian values and based around a Whole Food Model, which acknowledges that all aspects of the farm-to-fork system must be addressed simultaneously to truly build intergenerational and community wealth.
HAFA’s Health POWER project provided training and technical assistance to Hmong daycare providers, helped enroll them in the Child and Adult Care Food Program, and delivered 4,570 weekly boxes of fresh, culturally appropriate produce to in-home daycares.
They also expanded partnerships with other early care organizations building networks and collaborations that connected over 38 Hmong daycare providers. These providers are now teaching children about the importance of healthy food and how to prepare it at a pivotal time in their early child development. Finally, HAFA teamed up with community members to create a Hmong cultural recipe book that care providers can use to create healthy meals for children in their care.
The Association for Nonsmokers-Minnesota (ANSR)
ANSR is a nonprofit dedicated to reducing the human and economic costs of commercial tobacco use in Minnesota. During the Health POWER Funding Initiative, ANSR helped to pass multiple commercial tobacco policies across Minnesota. This policy work included changes to the tobacco ordinance in St. Paul that sets a $10 minimum price for cigarette packs and prohibits coupons for all tobacco and vaping product sales.
ANSR is now focusing on implementation and enforcement of these policies and ordinances, working with city staff in several municipalities to continue education and outreach on complying with the new policies. Check out the St. Paul Tobacco Ordinance case study to learn more about this vital work.
Leech Lake FamilySpirit EmPOWERment Program
The Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe is committed to the responsible operation of government, preservation of their heritage, promotion of their sovereignty, and the protection of natural resources for their elders and future generations, while enhancing the health, economic well-being, education, and their inherent right to live as Ojibwe People.
Leech Lake’s project centered on all three areas core to Health POWER funding. They collaborated with Indigenous families to encourage healthy eating habits, promote physically active lifestyles, encourage breastfeeding, as well as reduce commercial tobacco use and secondhand smoke exposure.
Key achievements of the program included: acquiring and renovating a new building for the Family Spirit program, which included a greenhouse, gardens, sweat lodge, and gathering space helping to further the environment for empowering cultural traditions. They created home gardens with elders and young families, planting native wildflower gardens, and creating and harvesting bee hives. They hosted and creating lesson plans for more than 68 cultural ceremonies and life teachings again helping the community to connect with their cultural histories. Finally, they initiated new tribal policies around breastfeeding, sacred tobacco, and the Rights of Nature, all furthering the conditions to promote positive health and wellness to their communities.
Lincoln Park Children and Families Collaborative (LPCFC)
The Lincoln Park Children and Families Collaborative’s mission is to support children and families by connecting them to resources and opportunities, embracing culture, and building community and well-being through strong and equitable leadership.
Through their Health POWER project, LPCFC recruited and trained community members to identify issues important to neighborhood residents and create equitable change, identifying access to food and hygiene products as priority issues for Lincoln Park community members. LPCFC expanded its programming to organize grocery and hygiene supply giveaways, deliver food to apartment residents, host community meals, and work towards longer-term solutions to advance food security.
LPCFC also empowered residents as community organizers, advocated for policies that improve health and wellbeing and distributed over 360,000 pounds of food and hygiene products to community members.
Lower Sioux Indian Community
The Lower Sioux Indian Community, Native American reservation located along the southern bank of the Minnesota River. They choose to create a worksite wellness program and also passed worksite wellness policies for tribal employees. Lower Sioux also made considerable progress on infrastructure and policy changes included hiring a Healthy Generations Project Coordinator to lead the program, establishing an Employee Wellness Advisory Committee, and creating a comprehensive communications plan for community-wide announcements.
The worksite wellness program in particular had major successes included establishing a bike share program, creating designated wellness rooms, and creating walking path maps for employees to use during their breaks to encourage physical activity. As Lower Sioux continues to make deep impact through their project, they will be expanding their work to community members through the same culturally based lens creating even more community wellness activities.
Trust for Public Land (TPL)
The Trust for Public Land’s has a mission to create parks and protect land for people, ensuring healthy, livable communities for generations to come. Their Health POWER project centered on Community Schoolyards where they aimed to transform existing schoolyards into student- and community-designed park-like areas that will allow for play, learning, and social growth.
Through partnerships with schools and community engagement efforts, TPL secured funding totaling $1.4 million and formalized partnerships with four elementary schools. TPL also completed the first ever statewide assessment for Healthy Community Schoolyards in the nation. The ultimate vision of this work is to transform underused school playgrounds into vibrant, community-designed Healthy Community Schoolyards, further health and wellness for generations to come.
The Food Group
The Food Group’s mission is simple but vital- to fight hunger and nourishing our community. The focus of their Health POWER strategy was their Food Shelf Leadership Development Program. It’s first step was creating a series of cohorts of leaders from organizations representing food shelves. The cohort program then supported the capacity of 20 food shelf partners in advancing racial equity through learnings, peer support, technical assistance, and skill building around community engagement. Results of this community empowerment saw those cohorts developed over 20 action plans for shared decision-making at food shelves and 25 PSE changes enacted by food shelf leaders in diversity, equity, and inclusion focusing on cultural competency, community interactions and physical changes to the food shelf environment.
OurStreets Minneapolis
As part of Health POWER, OurStreets Minneapolis actively changed the transportation planning process from the current “top-down” approach to one that centers community needs and leads to impactful and equitable changes. OurStreets Minneapolis works to put people first by transforming transportation and infrastructure in the Twin Cities and at the state level, so people can easily and comfortably walk, bike, roll, and use public transit.
OurStreets project saw them increase the democratic participation in transportation decision-making in five major neighborhoods and corridors, resulting in the approval of Lyndale Avenue South 4- to 3-lane conversion, successfully advocate for Hennepin County planning to install medians and crosswalks on Lyndale Avenue South, and impacting the upcoming design of Franklin Avenue and Lowry Ave NE to include narrower car lanes and wider sidewalks. OurStreets accomplished these huge PSE change successes by engaged more than 200,000 people through community organizations, neighborhood and outreach events, door knocking, emails and social media.
Sharing Our Roots
Sharing our Roots’ mission is to advance a resilient agriculture system that demonstrates the power to heal our lands, nourish our communities, and prepare emerging farmers. Through Health POWER, Sharing Our Roots (SOR) hired Community Connectors who are respected community members working to lead their neighborhoods towards food security.
The Connectors are multilingual, speaking Spanish and Swahili, and facilitate community events, lead agriculture trainings, conduct one-on-one outreach and support families with technical assistance throughout the growing season. Their work helped expand and manage seven neighborhood gardens in the area engaging 178 families to grow food in community gardens, and 23 families in SOR’s Community Landshare program, which allows immigrant families have access to land to grow food for their families or business.
The Alliance
The Alliance works to catalyze environmental change in communities around Minnesota to create opportunities and access for communities to be healthy. Through Health POWER, The Alliance collaborated with communities to revise their Equitable Development Principles Scorecard to include a physical activity and livability principle, and then collaborated with their partners to implement the tool.
The Alliance was also quick to evolve their work in the face of the crush inequitable impacts from the pandemic, the Alliance expanded their work to focus on housing and evictions to successfully advocate for the extension of the statewide eviction moratorium and increase financial assistance to support low-income BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) renters.
NorthPoint Health and Wellness
NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center is a community-based nonprofit that partners with residents of north Minneapolis and the surrounding area to create a healthier community. NorthPoint’s Health POWER project was focused on their long-standing dedications to reducing commercial tobacco use among residents of Minnesota. The projects particular focus was on Black youth and young adults, who are disproportionately targeted by commercial tobacco advertising and are more likely to die from tobacco -related illnesses than their white peers. NorthPoint worked with partners to successfully pass 14 policies aimed at restricting sales of and access to tobacco products, including menthol and flavored tobacco dramatically impacting the commercial tobacco landscape in their neighborhoods and communities.
In all, over the four years the Health POWER initiative was marked with deep equity work that saw positive successes in the form of 400+ policy, systems, and environmental changes. These PSE changes are all the more impressive as they were made against the constantly changing and challenging backdrop of the COVID pandemic, the mainstream awakening of racism as a public health crisis, and the domino effect they had on all our communities.
Moreover, the work of each project continues to flourish, and much of the accomplishments and sustainability has resulted in further innovations and projects being born in other forms, with the Center for Prevention continuing to collaborate with funding and resources. Such partnerships and commitments to working collectively to eliminate barriers to health, and proactively address the large-scale systemic issues that drive racial and health inequities are vital. We must remember that we are trying to achieve things that don’t have an endpoint, and instead part of a long journey to pave the way for all communities and to achieve their healthiest life.
