About 75 community leaders picked education Wednesday as the next top priority for improving life in the Mid-Columbia.
Leaders in business, health care, human services, schools and law enforcement spent two hours looking at information, including the results of a recent bilingual survey, to identify the most pressing community issues, said Beverly Weber, president and CEO of the United Way of Benton and Franklin Counties.
In the end, the group decided education should be the focus of its second Community Solutions initiative, she said.
Community Solutions is a regional health and human services planning and implementation process. The communitywide effort began in 2006 with four program priorities -- education, health, safety and self-sufficiency.
The first specific initiative, "Our Babies Can't Wait," launched in January to ultimately prepare newborns for success by the time they're 20 years old through prenatal education for mothers and focusing on nurturing environments and promoting learning opportunities and access to health care.
"We are now taking the second bite of the apple," Weber said. "We want to build up momentum (for positive change)."
The new initiative is less about academics and more about lifelong learning, she said. And it includes providing support to people of all ages involved in learning.
The initiative also will address urgent problem areas within the broad field of education and will find ways to increase parenting skills, offer mentoring programs and promote literacy.
Literate parents understand the value of education and often become an important part of educating their own children, Weber said.
Volunteers will now work to develop a plan to put the initiative in action, Weber said. And efforts will continue with the first initiative, as well, she said.
-- Pratik Joshi: 582-1541; pjoshi@tricityherald.com; Business Beat blog at www.tricityherald.com
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One Washington lawmaker is hoping that requiring hospitals to assess community health every three years will result in them better meeting community health needs.
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One Washington lawmaker is hoping that requiring hospitals to assess community health every three years will result in them better meeting community health needs.
Rep. Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, introduced a bill that would require public hospital districts such as the Kennewick Public Hospital District and nonprofit hospitals such as Lourdes Medical Center and Kadlec Regional Medical Center, to perform a community health needs assessment once every three years.
Hospitals also would have to draft a plan for how to serve the community within a year after completing each assessment.
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