photo by: Elvyn Jones/Journal-World

Vendor Jill Elmers, left, of the Moon on the Meadow booth, prepares flowers for Cassie Parker at the Lawrence Farmers' Market’s season-opening day on Saturday, April 13, 2019.

A local health organization will be receiving funds from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas’ statewide health and wellness initiative, and it hopes to use them for farmers market programs, anti-tobacco efforts in schools, community health resource navigators and more.

LiveWell Douglas County was one of 19 organizations in the state selected to receive funding for the current phase of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield program, which is called Pathways to a Healthy Kansas. Ginny Barnard, executive director of LiveWell Douglas County, said she doesn’t know yet how much funding the organization will get, but that it will be used to help pay for the coordination and implementation of a variety of projects to improve Douglas County residents’ health.

“People are the most important element of this project, and if we don’t have the people to get the work done, it’s not going to happen,” Barnard told the Journal-World.

In LiveWell’s application to the Pathways initiative, it lists several projects it hopes to tackle with the funding. They include:

• Farmers market improvements. LiveWell wants to leverage the expertise of the Lawrence Farmers’ Market to mentor two smaller markets in Douglas County, the Eudora Farmers Market and Cottin’s Hardware Farmers Market. It wants to enable customers at the smaller markets to purchase food using SNAP/EBT benefits. It also hopes to expand the nutrition incentives available at the larger Lawrence Farmers’ Market.

• Substance abuse prevention in schools. In a partnership with DCCCA and the Engage Douglas County coalition, LiveWell wants to help update school policies and prevention strategies to reduce substance abuse among students, including tobacco use and vaping.

• Bicycle and pedestrian projects. LiveWell wants to make “multimodal improvements along a segment of Massachusetts Street” to better connect bike routes at the University of Kansas and in western and central Lawrence to downtown. The application says that could involve filling in some missing sidewalks, bringing sidewalks and ramps up to city and ADA accessibility standards, and bus stop improvements.

• Studying the fairgrounds incubator kitchen program. The Douglas County Fairgrounds currently has a commercial kitchen that is available for food entrepreneurs to rent. However, LiveWell’s application says demand is high enough that it is currently “booked out for 6 months in advance,” making it difficult for new businesses to get started or scale up there. LiveWell wants to do a study about ways to expand this incubator kitchen or add a new incubator space.

• A “Community Navigator Program.” This program, as described in the application, will be housed within the United Way of Kaw Valley and will help connect people in need with health and wellness resources in the community.

Barnard said many of these projects tie into Douglas County’s five-year Community Health Improvement Plan, which Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health and its partners launched in October.

“Just because of that timing and the timing of this grant, we were able to connect a lot of our projects into areas that we want to make progress on in the Community Health Improvement Plan, which is super exciting,” Barnard said.

She said that the organization’s overarching goal is to really think about where health disparities are in the community. She said LiveWell is looking into what gaps are in the community and how they can help fill or build bridges to meet those needs.

“We want to use systems, policies and environmental changes to help bridge those gaps, because those are the long-term solutions,” Barnard said.

This is the second time that LiveWell has received funding from Pathways to a Healthy Kansas. In the last round of funding it received, it got about $300,000 in total. Exactly how much grant money LiveWell will receive this time will depend on the type of work done for each project and the number of partners involved, Barnard said.

Since the Pathways initiative was created in 2016, it has distributed 748 grants across the state to implement programs and policies that improve the health of Kansans, according to a news release.

“Improving health and well-being across Kansas starts with empowering communities to address the unique challenges they each face,” Matt All, president and CEO of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas, said in the release. “We are honored to welcome these new communities into the next phase of the Pathways initiative where together we can create meaningful change, ensuring every Kansan has the opportunity to lead a healthier, more fulfilling life.”