Over the last three years, BUILD awardees have been building community power and changing systems to create healthier neighborhoods. This story features the collaborative in Pinetop-Lakeside, AZ.
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In Pinetop-Lakeside, a rural community in Arizona, a collaboration of community partners is building the infrastructure rural families need to be healthy. Through community surveys and a feasibility study, the Pinetop-Lakeside collaborative educated key stakeholders about the connection between childcare and health, leading to the development of plans for a new childcare center in the area.
While making meaningful strides in childcare policy, including advancing a bill to establish a fund for future childcare center development in rural communities across the state, another opportunity for collaboration emerged: aligning agencies and streamlining resources for residents. The team developed a resource and case management platform to create a connected continuum of care for residents and improve efficiency for getting local data into state systems.
Over the past three years, the collaborative has:
- Developed and deployed a new referral system that provides a continuum of care for rural residents to connect to more than 1,900 resources for a wide variety of needs, including mental health, food, housing, tribal services, early childhood education, substance use services, and more.
- Implemented and expanded community-led case management technology that streamlined intake, assessment, and demographic data collection.
- Created a data pipeline from local communities to the state’s reporting systems that enabled communities to have real-time access to their data and removed 8 months of lag time.
- Educated stakeholders and elected officials on the need for affordable childcare, resulting in the AZ State HR 2239 (Blackman), a bill that would establish a child care infrastructure fund (currently moving through the legislature).
- Strengthened the community’s case for investments in childcare by surveying families and publishing a feasibility study, solidifying evidence of potential impact.
Read about the BUILD Pinetop-Lakeside initiative, and learn more.
“A high-quality early childhood experience is a protective factor that mitigates ACEs and traumatic, toxic stress experiences. We’re looking at long-term health outcome data and intervening and interrupting those correlations.”
