Greenfield, IA

One of the first tasks completed after our Action Forum was the creation of a community directory. Many directories have been distributed, but that doesn’t substitute for actually connecting with some of the service providers. During the Horizons Community Celebration a number of programs set up tables and visited with community members attending the supper. Public health, the Neighborhood Center (fuel assistance, food pantry), Child Care Resource and Referral, Social Security, Master Gardener, Methodist Church Food Pantry, local banks, and Henry A Wallace Country Life Center all had someone there to visit with people. Of course, copies of the resource directory were available, too.

The Adair County Hot Shots 4-H club and Growing Strong Families program had kids activities which were very popular. All segments of the community were represented in the approximate 175 attendance. Families with young children, teens, business community members, religious leaders, elderly, and residents with disabilities.

The Food for All Task Force established the celebration as a drop off point for food or cash to support local food pantries. 105.85 in cash was collected along with approximately 200 food items. These items help stock nearly empty shelves at the two local food pantries.

At last the idea of a cooking class featuring nutrition information and low-cost recipes for families with young children has started. On Sunday June 29th, 11 people met for the first workshop in the Cooking For Life series. There were six participants and five mentors.

The food group feature for the day was calcium so we did an activity to improve label reading skills and think about where you can get calcium.

The main course was Mexican Mess, a type of Mexican lasagna. It includes cheese, a calcium rich food. We didn’t eat the food on site, because the idea was to take it home for supper. One of the participants already reported she served it for supper and her family loved it!

We prepared home-made pudding. It was cool because everyone learned it was easy to do, a lot cheaper than the little prepared packs and a better source of calcium.

4-H’ers volunteered to watch the kids while the adults cooked. They had fun coloring and playing with playdoh.

At the end of the session all of the participants received a set of Pyrex dishes, all of the ingredients in the meals, bags to put them in, and two cans of green beans to cook at home.

I think everyone had a great time for the first session and learned a lot. They identified they would like to learn to make ham Balls or meat loaf, cheesy macaroni corn, and apple crisp at the July session.

There is a lot of support from the community. The Adair County 4-H Youth Council, Nodaway Valley Market, Fareway, Pamida, Thrivent, Summerset Citizens, and Empowerment have all given cash resources for this project.

Hopefully there will be a number of benefits to this project. Goals of the projects are to build a strong community support system for young families and provide an opportunity for young families to develop new skills in cooking, organization, planning, and budgeting.

A new model for parent education is emerging since the Horizons Study Circles. When a grant for Community Partnership for Protecting Children was written to Prevent Child Abuse Iowa, several key questions from Study Circles were considered. How are parents involved in the decision-making and program implementation? What barriers need to be addressed so parents can participate?
The Great Beginnings curriculum, a 5-session program, was selected to receive a grant of approximately $3000. Parents were invited to participate in the facilitator training. There was a special effort to engage low-resource parents. Child care was provided so they could attend the training. As a result, ISU Extension Families Specialist and the Growing Strong Families parent educator have teamed up with two different parents to offer the series twice within the community. Both the parents and the parent educator are paid for their facilitation services from grant funds. The grant also provided funds for child care at each session and a light meal.  Several organizations also provided resources to the program including FACT Empowerment and Family Rewards.
Recently one of the parents serving as a facilitator shared her personal story with the State Empowerment Board. She talked about moving to the community, working to blend families, and meeting the parent educator at a WIC clinic. It was obvious how her confidence had grown and how empowering it was for her to be asked to become involved as a facilitator. Since she got involved in a leadership role, she has also accepted employment at a local business and already has received a promotion.
Getting professionals to think about assets of families and involving the people they serve in leadership roles can have a huge impact on both individuals and the community. This is just an example of how thinking differently about how to deliver a service can have a big pay-off.

Governor Chet Culver announces the names of the 48 school districts in Iowa receiving state funds for 2008-2009 under the Statewide Voluntary Preschool Program for Four-Year-Old Children. Nodaway Valley is one of the districts !   This amounts to approximately $3000 per student with a projection of 50 participants totalling $150,000 brought into the local school district and community.  In additon 5 new jobs will be created with two certified teachers and 3 paraprofessionals to be hired for the program.  The Statewide Voluntary Preschool Program for Four-Year-Old Children was established in 2007 when Governor Culver signed House File 877. The purpose of the statewide preschool program is to expand the opportunity for Iowa’s young children to access quality preschool environments and enter school ready to learn. With these newly approved programs, the state will be providing access to approximately 4,341 more 4-year-olds. Governor Culver said, “Every child in Iowa deserves the best start as they begin their educational journey. With this announcement, we are offering a greater number of Iowa’s youngest citizens the opportunity for a solid beginning.” Districts applied for the competitive state grant to provide at least 10 hours a week of quality preschool instruction through collaborative community partnerships. A total of 161 school districts applied for the grant. The Iowa Department of Education selected the school districts to receive funding based on several criteria. Priority was given to high-poverty districts currently without preschool programs. Also considered were collaborative efforts with community early childhood partners and district size. The 2008 legislature appropriated $15 million for 2008-2009, which is the second school year the preschool program has been available to Iowa school districts. The planning done as part of the Horizons project was instrumental in preparing the grant. The grant readers noted the high level of planning by the community, planning to serve low-income children, and commitment to quality early children education. Now that the grant has been awarded, a number of the Quality Early Childhood Care and Education task force will be helping with implementation.

Each year Iowa 4-H holds a Legislative Day for junior high and high school age students. As part of the event 4-H’ers have a chance to explore important issues. I was asked to present a workshop on poverty because of my involvement in the Horizons project. I partnered with my County Extension Education Director to plan and deliver the workshop. Actually, we delivered it twice due to the high level of interest.

I wanted the workshop to be as hands-on as possible so I designed a Poverty Jeopardy game to help teach 4-H’ers and their adult leaders more about poverty. I went back to the areas we really examined in Study Circles and put together different categories including food, abbreviations, education, employment, and by the numbers (statistics). Each category had a range of questions all varying in difficulty.  All of the questions had to do with poverty, at the local, state and national levels.

The participants of this workshop had a great time playing and hopefully learned a lot. Many youth hadn’t ever thought about the gap between minimum wage and a “living wage” required to meet basics. The difference in earning power based on level of education was an eye-opener to many.

 I had a great time presenting because I had the opportunity to look at people’s views on why other people are in poverty.  Many of the people, if they hadn’t known it before, realized that poverty can be very situational.  Often times a certain event will happen, like a major illness or loss of a job, that will cause the people to fall into poverty.  The vast majority of the participants were interested in exploring how good education, creation of jobs, and supportive services that builds on family assets could help reduce poverty. Other participants were very opinionated and weren’t interested in listening to other points of view, convinced that everyone living in poverty is simply lazy. I realized that although most people really want to be part of the solution, some would rather blame others. We need to keep doing education on poverty for those who do have an open mind and help move them to action. It would be easy to be discouraged by people who put up barriers, but by surrounding yourself with others who truly care and want to reduce poverty like the Horizons project has done for my community it is easier to stay on track.

At the end of the workshop we asked participants to identify ways they could get involved in fighting poverty within their community. Almost everyone was able to provide a concrete way and some that attended as a 4-H club group were ready to go right to work on a project. We tried to help them think about how they could make their 4-H club a welcoming place for youth from all income levels. Hopefully some of them will go back and examine their own practices and make changes. For many it just helping raise awareness and giving them a chance to talk about how they can have a positive impact.

The two new providers in the area are continuing to offer services to more families whose children need care. The Horizons Child Care group kept the YMCA informed of grant opportunities and actually got them technical assistance to write grants. They succeeded by securing grant dollars to purchase new equipment for the child care center. One of their first purchases was toddler-sized tables and chairs in order to let toddlers eat at their own level and be comfortable. The child care group is planning to continue to keep an eye out for funding, professional development, and other opportunities to help ensure the child care centers around are offering the best services available.

A new Family Rewards center has opened up for families with children up to 18 months. The purpose is to reward families with points towards supplies (diapers to feeding supplies to toys and strollers) for doing things like attending parenting classes, going to child’s well-baby visits, and adopting healthy behaviors such as quit smoking or completing high school. Horizons participant Tracey Mavis is the director of the brand new program and is using the connections she developed as part of Horizons to help connect families with support systems in the community.

The Horizons Quality child care group is a leader in helping exploring Voluntary preschool in our school district. Nina Utterback, Maureen Lonsdale, Joanie Finck, Angie Powell, and Janelle Kralik are taking an active role in helping the Nodaway Valley school district explore options and ideas for a possible 4-year old voluntary preschool program. They are partnering with school officials, preschool programs, and young families to identify the characteristics of quality preschools and consider ways to enhance preschool education within the community. During the first session it was exciting to see we had great agreement about what quality involves. The challenge now is to figure out how the community can work together to make sure we provide the best preschool education in possible for our children.

Connecting people with resources continues to be one of the goals of our horizons project, but sometimes no resources exist, especially in the case of an emergency. Emergency financial assistance is now available for not only 0-5 year olds, but also 6-18 year olds through funding from the Creston Cluster Decat project. After hearing about the situations of several families with 0-5 year olds who took advantages of the emergency fund to meet some very basic needs, it feels even better to know that more kids can be helped now. Elementary students, middle schoolers, and high schoolers whose families are struggling with medical bills, aren’t getting mental health help because of costs or know that their student is struggling with school because they need glasses but can’t afford them will be able to seek help out solutions through the newly expanded Emergency fund.