NCHH30 Throwback Thursday

Week 16: September 15, 2022

by Christopher Bloom

NCHH turned THIRTY this year, so we’re celebrating with a new “Throwback Thursday” photo each week.

Just over three years ago, NCHH joined expert partners Altarum, ChangeLab Solutions, CommonHealth ACTION, Earthjustice, Environmental Defense Fund, National League of Cities, and Prevention Institute for a day-long gathering with our National Lead Poisoning Prevention Network grantees: Central Maine Community Health/Healthy Androscoggin, Childhood Lead Action Project, the City of Buffalo, City of Paterson Division of Health, Environmental Health Watch, Healthy Homes Coalition of West Michigan, Legal Services of Central New York, Southern United Neighborhoods, and the Virginia Poverty Law Center.

Just look at what these grantees accomplished in only 18 months!

With primary funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and additional support from The New York Community Trust, NCHH awarded grants to applicants from nine localities across the United States, varying in location, community size, and level of readiness toward accomplishing their lead poisoning prevention goals. Each grantee received 18 months of coaching and support, including access to national experts, engagement in a peer learning network, a customized analysis calculating the cost of childhood lead exposure and the economic benefits of interventions, and a $25,000 grant.

Working with new community partners (and some familiar faces) through our mini-grant projects has been incredibly rewarding—it’s one of the reasons we continue to offer them! (And yes, we’ll be announcing another group of grantees within the next few weeks.) We expected these grantees to be amazing, of course, but even we were impressed by how completely they crushed it. You can read the details in the fact sheet we’ve included in this post.

Now, about the “Equipping Communities for Action:
2019 Lead Poisoning Prevention Grantee Meeting”
event we alluded to at the beginning of this post…. On this day, September 13, 2019, NCHH, our cadre of experts, and even representatives of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the New York Community Trust joined our nine grantees at National League of Cities’ headquarters in Washington, DC, for a day of project updates, each group delivering their presentation onstage to everyone else, and rotating breakout sessions, in which grantee teams, expert partners, and NCHH staff all moved around the room to exchange ideas and strategies with other groups. To a passer-by, the rotations might’ve appeared completely random, but all the moves had been carefully orchestrated beforehand by our Amy Murphy, facilitator extraordinaire. It was a great opportunity for all the grantees to meet each other and the experts, and for us to get to know them better as well.

We were well-armed with cameras on this day and shot over 200 photos of the proceedings, but if we had to choose just one photo to illustrate the event for this week’s throwback, it would be this one, which shows funder representatives (RWJF’s Pam Russo and Giridhar Mallya, with consultant Rebecca Morley) listening to grantees Environmental Health Watch at the first table, NCHH’s Amanda Reddy listening to grantees City of Paterson at the second table, and one of our expert partners (Tom Neltner from Environmental Defense Fund) offering sage advice to the City of Buffalo at the third table. Listen, listen some more, then talk. On the stage is Amy Murphy, and you can even see this round’s group assignments on the screen.

It’s really tempting to show additional photos of our partners from this grantee meeting—because NCHH loves working with partners—but we’re going to hold off…for now.

At the front table, clockwise from left: Tracie Washington (Environmental Health Watch, EHW), Pamela Russo and Giridhar Mallya (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), Rebecca Morley, Kim Foreman (EHW), Jan Kelemen (EHW), and Kevin McDaniel (EHW). At the second table: Jean Mugulusi (City of Paterson), Anthony Santiago (National League of Cities, NLC), Amanda Reddy (NCHH), Anne Li (NLC), Kaity Rodriguez (Paterson), and Alicia Espinal-Mesa.(Paterson) At the third table: Tom Neltner (Environmental Defense Fund) and Anna Falicov (City of Buffalo). Standing onstage is Amy Murphy (NCHH). Also pictured around the room are Jonathan Wilson and Laura Fudala (NCHH), Corey Rhyan (Altarum), Chanel Barnes-Osula and Nehanda Lindsey (CommonHealth ACTION), and Elva Yañez (Prevention Institute).

See You Next Week

We hope that you’ve enjoyed this throwback in honor of our 30th anniversary. Remember that we’ll post a new throwback every Thursday morning at 9:04 a.m. on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter through May 25, 2023. If you’ve missed a previous post, you can always reminisce with us via our NCHH30 gallery.

Christopher Bloom is NCHH’s communications and marketing manager. He joined NCHH in 2008 after nearly a decade in the real estate industry. In a previous role at NCHH, he coordinated a national Renovation, Repair, and Painting (RRP) training program, one of the most successful in the nation. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Textual Studies from Syracuse University.