Healthy Homes - Healthy Children II

By Melissa Millerschoen, Gail Raspanti, and Chris Wagner

Healthy Homes--Healthy Children is a not-for-profit public health initiative born in 2007 from the Crawford County Household Lead Assessment Project (CCHLAP). We focus on three primary efforts. One is that we conduct lead, mold and radon assessments in Crawford County homes, particularly for families with young children. During the visits, we help homeowners identify key areas of concern and provide a tailored plain to help families address their more pressing environmental health issues.

In the broader community, we offer a number of educational materials on health related topics, especially those relevant to younger children. During the academic year, we offer a series of hands-on, interactive activities to area 4th-6th graders. Our presentation covers various health and healthy homes concerns for use in health, physical education or science classrooms. These presentations provide students with ways to tackle environmental health concerns in their homes. Community events like the Crawford Country Fair provide HHHC with a venue to buld community awareness of environmental health and healthy homes issues. Again, we offer hands-on, interactive activiies to illuminate environmental health resources for families and community members. Helping us in our efforts are a number of community organizations including health and social service agencies with whom we work in collaboration.

This summer we are working on continuing our past programs and expanding our ability to provide services to the community through follow-up visits as well as a protocol to measure the efficacy of our education methods.

Sustainable Switchgrass

By Sandra Wayman

Switchgrass is a crop grown for biomass as an alternative energy fuel source. Compared with corn, which is traditionally used for ethanol production, switchgrass can be much more efficient as a fuelsource. Switchgrass requires much less fertilizer, less irrigation, and sequesters carbon in the soil. This summer I have been working in Dr. Richard Bowden’s Environmental Science lab, researching switchgrass. We are partnering with Ernst Conservation Seeds, a local business in Meadville which supplies seeds and plants for conservation needs. My research project is examining nitrogen retranslocation in switchgrass.

Retranslocation is the movement of nitrogen between the roots and the shoots in switchgrass. Nitrogen is an important plant nutrient because it helps increase switchgrass yield. Farmers fertilize with chemical nitrogen, but to be as sustainable as possible it is important to try to reduce chemical inputs while still harvesting enough yield. Through retranslocation plants naturally recycle their nitrogen, which means they could potentially need less fertilizer. However, swithgrass is usually harvested in the fall, before it has had a chance to retranslocate its nitrogen back to the roots so the nitrogen is removed along with the biomass. However, if farmers wait until after a killing frost, some of the biomass is wasted and yield is decreased. The goal of my study is to examine the retranslocation of nitrogen over time and to estimate how much could be saved in fertilizer if the natural retranslocation process could run to completion.

My work involves digging switchgrass samples from my two study fields, hosing soil of the roots, sorting the switchgrass into its different components, drying the biomass, weighing it, and finally grinding it to be analyzed for nitrogen concentration. I enjoy the combination of outdoor fieldwork and working with my hands in the lab.

I hope my research will benefit Ernst Conservation Seeds, help farmers with switchgrass management, and increase the sustainability of switchgrass. I am excited to be doing research on an alternative energy source.

The Market House

By Erin Sweeney

The Meadville Market House has been an integral cornerstone in the life of the Meadville community since 1870. It currently houses a wide variety of local and organic foods, hand-made crafts, fair trade products and a weekly farmer’s market every Saturday. In recent years, the Market House has begun to focus much more on improving the accessibility to local, healthy foods in Meadville through an initiative called Project ONE. Project O.N.E aims to bring partner organizations together under one umbrella to support this goal, while providing information about the availability and benefits of local foods.

My work as a Davies Leader this summer has been focused on continuing the development of Project ONE in its third year of existence. Project ONE currently includes the Market House’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, and will be expanding to include nutrition classes later in the summer and fall. Community Supported Agriculture programs create mutually supportive relationships between local farmers and community members. Members of the CSA receive weekly boxes of fresh, local produce, and local farmers are guaranteed a reliable market for their crops. The Market House’s “Summer’s Bounty” CSA is unique because it subsidizes weekly produce baskets for seniors through the subscriptions of full members, so that seniors in the area receive local produce at a greatly reduced price, providing them with access to a resource they may not otherwise be able to afford. This summer has been very successful so far with the number of seniors that we have been able to support through Project ONE, and we hope to begin canning classes at the Northwest Physician’s Association kitchen later next month.

We have also added information throughout the Market House about the different products and food staples that are available here, so that shoppers learn what foods such as quinoa and couscous are, and how to cook them. In this way, Project ONE is providing educational information to community members about healthy eating options. In the fall we look forward to the completion of the Market House cookbook which will focus on healthy, fairly simple recipes that use local and raw products.

A Decade of Collaboration in Read Between the Signs

This summer, I am working to write and design a book that brings together many of the Art & the Environment Initiative projects from the past ten years. Namely, the Signs and Flowers, Read Between the Signs, Greening the Gateway, Market House garden, and I-79 efforts. Each of these projects represent powerful and lasting instances of continuous collaboration between Allegheny College, the local community, PennDOT, and other partners from even farther away.

Upon its completion, the book will be a visual showcase of what can be accomplished when we are open to the ideas of others, and how a community can truly shape itself into something both beautiful and meaningful, creating place in an extraordinarily unique way.

In addition to this work, I am also designing this year's Civic Engagement Newsletter, which will soon be found both online (civicengagement.allegheny.edu) and in select locations around campus in physical form. The newsletter, written this year by Emily Bacheller, seeks to complement this blog by revealing the fantastic work that Allegheny students, faculty and staff have done in the past year with our community partners to make Meadville a place to be proud of, and a place that is continually growing more beautiful in both visage and spirit.

If you have any questions about either of these projects, or have something you'd like to contribute to them, please do contact me at valentd@allegheny.edu.

Energy and Society Program

Allegheny College provides an excellent suite of programs and courses for students interested in sustainability and community development. The Environmental Science, Political Science, and Economics Departments all have offerings that engage students in these topics. A student can major or minor in any of these departments with an emphasis in, for instance, environmental politics, or can major in Environmental Studies. But there is no program that takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to teaching topics like sustainable development and "green living."

An Energy and Society program would fill this gap by providing students with an interdisciplinary curriculum, likely enough for a minor, that covers topics in sustainable development with a focus on energy consumption and its effects on history and modern society. As such Professor Maniates and myself are developing the resources necessary to create several courses to fit within this program. We hope to have several courses in place next year to supplement the few that already exist, and also develop several modules within existing courses so that they too could count for the program.

This suite of resources will serve to create courses in Political Science, Economics, and History first. These departments are an excellent starting point for extending into the divisions of humanities and natural sciences. The courses we are currently pursuing in Political Science are courses focusing on Chinese energy policy and the sociopolitical effects of the energy trade on the Middle East. In History we are considering several options, including one on the rise of the automobile in American life. Finally we have no clear indication of how to proceed in Economics, but would likely hope to integrate an energy component into existing Environmental Economics curriculum, though the practicality of that is unclear.

Over the rest of the summer we will lay more clear plans, which I'll continue to post on this blog. Hopefully within the next few weeks we will have a more exacting list of those courses that will be developed for the rest of the summer, as well as have a stronger vision for an Energy and Society curriculum in the humanities and natural sciences.

Healthy Homes - Healthy Children

By Katie Huser

The Healthy Homes - Healthy Children (HHHC) program offers critical services, education, and outreach opportunities to the community. This summer I have been working with Dr. Caryl Waggett to redesign and update our HHHC website. I have spent a day at Second District Elementary School for Parent/Child Day to educate nearly 100 parents and children on our Healthy Homes – Healthy Children program. I took interactive activities such as “Pick Your Poison, Mistaken Identities” and the dollhouse to make my demonstration interactive with the younger audience. I also continued educational outreach by helping Gail Raspanti and Melissa Millerschoen, HHHC research assistants, at the Conneaut Lake Elementary School Math and Reading Open House. Additionally, I spent two days at Women, Infants, and Children talking with patients and families about HHHC’s free in-home assessment services. I interacted with the children that wanted to play “house” with me, with our demonstration dollhouse.

This summer I will still be creating a video for our free in-home assessments to inform local families and non-profit agencies in the region about this essential service and intervention program.  In addition to this promotion work, I am also working with Dr. Waggett to develop a pair of community advisory boards that will help guide Healthy Homes-Healthy Children in its long term planning. These boards include a Parents Advisory Council and a Community Advisory Committee, comprised of key representatives from community partners whose work unites with HHHC’s mission to improve childhood health. These advisory boards will help sustain the HHHC mission into the future. This effort expands on work that I have already initiated with HHHC community partners to develop clear points of alignment and memorandums of understanding.  Finally, I am continuing to expand and enhance current classroom and community outreach activities that will help promote our role and our community partners in the local area. I am focusing on pre-kindergarten and elementary school programming along with high-risk schools around Crawford County.

A Meadville Stimulus

Due to the current economic crisis, the local tool and die industry has been adversely affected. It is our goal to contact firms and learn exactly what is happening across the industry. Professor Steve Onyeiwu, Matt McLamb, and I have been working hard to get this project off the ground. Our study is focused on companies located within Crawford and Erie counties.

So far, we have interviewed 10 firms primarily in the Meadville area. In the coming weeks, we plan to investigate between 30 and 40 additional companies. We will begin to branch outside of Meadville and to firms with different manufacturing processes.

This week we plan on creating a hypothesis for which we can prove at the end of the project. As well, we well continue to visit companies, get plant tours, and talk to company presidents.
In August, Matt and I look forward to publishing a newspaper article in the Meadville Tribune regarding our final findings.