Lower Columbia Community Health Project: "Aiding Vulnerable Populations"

Astoria, OR, 2004

Returning grantee KMUN and community partner Cowlitz Family Health Center (FHC)—a private nonprofit that provides health care service to the poor, minority and other underserved populations—extended the scope of the Lower Columbia Community Health Project with Aiding Vulnerable Populations. The project focused in on a particularly vulnerable segment of the local population: at-risk teens. This decision was a direct response to research and community input received during the project's first year.

Located in the Pacific Northwest near the mouth of the Columbia River, the coastal communities served by KMUN and FHC are rural, remote and economically strapped. Inadequacies in family income, adult supervision and community resources contribute significantly to a staggering "new morbidity" among area adolescents. Teen suicide, pregnancy, alcoholism, drug and tobacco abuse, and dropout rates in the Lower Columbia-Pacific region are among the highest in the Northwest.

Aiding Vulnerable Populations incorporated a range of programming, including "Teen Meetings," a new, monthly, one-hour, teen-hosted/produced issues-and-music program. Different from "town meetings," Teen Meetings tackled teen health-risk issues. In addition, "Prevention PSAs" were produced and narrated by teens, in English and Spanish, along with a series of radio segments, "Teen Voices," addressing issues and priorities with a teen perspective (also in English and Spanish).

The project included a range of community engagement and promotional activities: convening a series of Health Professional Roundtable meetings, designed as workshops to identify/discuss specific agency and community challenges in intervening effectively with at-risk teens and to brainstorm possible strategies to overcome these challenges; recruiting an advisory panel of teens from area high schools and alternative programs; designing and conducting a contest among teens to write radio-spot scripts and design billboard material to promote the messages developed by project staff working with the teen advisory panel; producing PSAs to air on KMUN and selected commercial radio stations; developing a project web site; and submitting teens' op-eds to local newspapers.

Awards:

KMUN Round Three

First Place Award for News Writing (Div. II) for "Spring Break"
—Oregon Associated Press

2004 Golden Reel Award Finalist for Local Documentary for "VOCA Camp"
—National Federation of Community Broadcasters

"Community Journalism Initiative"
$10,000 for local news and public affairs
— Oregon Community Foundation

$4,000 to support Spanish-language programming and translation for the LCCHP
— Mackenzie River Gathering

$20,000 for Community Journalism Initiative
— Paul G. Allen Charitable Trust

$2,000 for programming
—PacifiCorp Foundation for Learning

$5,000 for programming
—Bloomfield Family Foundation