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.