If you visit Milwaukee County’s service and community centers, you might soon notice some new furniture and gym equipment. That's because Milwaukee County received a $250,000 prize for improvements to health equity in the community. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recognized nine communities nationwide with the Culture of Health Prize. Milwaukee and Green Bay are among last year's recipients.
The foundation highlighted several Milwaukee County efforts, including becoming the first jurisdiction in the country to declare racism a public health crisis and the deployment of harm reduction vending machines. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley explains how the award funds will go back to the community.
What is the Culture of Health Prize and how was Milwaukee County selected for it?
This is really about recognizing communities who have been working at the forefront as it relates to making sure you can break down barriers and really advance health, opportunity and equity for everyone. This is a very competitive process. It's been going on for the past 10 years and communities all across the entire country apply to receive dollars to be recognized for the Culture of Health Prize. In this particular year, receiving the 2024 Culture of Health Prize was very competitive.
First and foremost, it was the 10th and the final year of this prize. We later learned that it was one of the most competitive years of the decade. For Milwaukee County to be one of the top applicants out of over 400 communities across the nation, it's something that we should be proud of.
Are there any specific initiatives or projects that come to mind that helped the county earn this award?
I’m not sure if there's a specific initiative, but I do think that when we look at how we have created partnerships, how we have worked around health, the way that we've created our COVID dashboard, making sure to track race and ethnicity and utilizing that to inspire the other communities across the country to focus on their own dashboards. I also think when we look at what Milwaukee has been doing with our unsheltered homeless population and having the lowest unsheltered homeless count per capita than any other community across the country has put us in this position.
But even as we think about moving forward, really letting them know what we want to be able to do with this recognition and with those dollars that we're going to receive. The way that we plan on utilizing these prize funds, we want to make sure that we can continue to maximize our impact, especially on some key projects. One, we recently just opened our doors to the Marcia P. Coggs Health and Human Services Center. We want to basically make sure that we're doing the outreach to make sure that folks are aware of the new location, but also the services that we provide.
We want to use these dollars to help support and provide resources for those who are unsheltered near the King Park neighborhood, but also you think about King Park, but also our Kosciuszko Community Center, which serves many older adults as well as young people and how we can make some critical improvements there. When we talk about health, we want to make sure that people can age in place and so this is going to allow us to continue our membership as one of AARP's age-friendly communities, by making sure that people understand that we're keeping our eyes on the north star making sure that we can become a healthy community.
It's not just the physical and mental health aspects, right, because access to a good paying job is health access to affordable and attainable housing is health. Access to transportation, childcare; those things are health. As long as we continue to work along those lines, focusing on the social determinants of health, improving the lives for our most marginalized communities will put us in a much better position because they'll need fewer services and we'll be able to invest in all the other programs and services that people rely on.
So the county is awarded $250,000 for this award. What is the timeline for distributing those funds and what is that allocated amount? Does it differ depending on the projects that it's supporting?
It will depend on the project that we're going to be supporting, but again we're going to be supporting a lot of different projects. I'm not quite sure exactly what the timeline is with these dollars, but what I can tell you is that we know how to be prudent with not only taxpayer dollars, but with grant dollars and foundational dollars that we receive here in Milwaukee County. What we want to do is not only get these resources out as quickly as possible, we want to make sure they can have the greatest impact on our community as well.
