GREENFIELD — A final round of grants from Baystate Franklin Medical Center to community partners was announced Tuesday, doling out $245,000 to four agencies over the next two to three years.
The money awarded is the completion of a total of $1.3 million in grants the hospital promised to distribute to community agencies following the building of a surgery center, which opened in 2016. Massachusetts Department of Public Health requires a portion of the money on a project like this to be earmarked for community health needs.
“What we do in this community to make it healthier for patients is really something I haven’t seen at any other community hospital,” Ron Bryant, president of Baystate Franklin and Baystate Noble in Westfield, said at the presentation held in the lobby of surgery center at the Greenfield hospital Tuesday.
In June 2016 the $26 million facility was completed. Its opening also meant that 5 percent of the cost of the project had to go to community health agencies in the area.
This year the $245,000 went to: Communities That Care Coalition of the Franklin Regional Council of Governments, the Montague Catholic Social Ministries, DIAL/SELF and the perinatal program of Community Action Pioneer Valley.
The four organizations were selected from an applicant pool of 13 local organizations.
Communities That Care Coalition was the lone applicant that was extended from the previous grant cycle for this $1.3 million.
The coalition, led by Kat Allen, received $75,000 over the next three years. This will help the program continue to implement school resources like LifeSkills, which teaches students how to deal with questions of substance use and alcohol.
“We have lost all of our federal funding and at a time when we might need to go under,” Allen said about expiring grants that are nonrenewable and not related to partisan politics. “That’s when Baystate stepped in.”
Community Action’s Franklin County Perinatal Support Coalition also received $75,000 for three years.
“The support from Baystate helps to wrap our support to these families more tightly,” said Sandy Bastone. of the coalition.
She said the funds from the hospital help them provide mothers with more support, especially with simple but extremely helpful things like transportation and child care.
In the first round of grants, totalling about $1.1 million, money went to addiction services, community health for elders and low income people.
DIAL/SELF young adult outreach and supportive services was awarded $50,000 over two years.
The money will help the organization continue to address youth homelessness and help children find more housing stability, Executive Director Phil Ringwood said.
Montague Catholic Social Ministries, which formed out of the domestic violence crisis in Turners Falls in 1994, will use the $45,000 over two years for its M.I.N.D. & S.O.A.R. program. It helps to bring together the English- and Spanish-speaking community in Turners, which is a common request of its participants, Executive Director Heather Wood Treme said.
“We feel like with that kind of resource and backing we can really make a difference in our community and reach a lot of people in our community,” Family Center Coordinator Dr. Mary King said.
In the previous grant cycle, which distributed $1.1 million to five organizations, the money went to: opioid overdose prevention programs run by Tapestry, the creation of a regional database for health and human service providers through Community Action Pioneer Valley, increased accessibility to healthy foods for low income people via the community farm Just Roots, a chronic disease self-management program at LifePath, and youth substance use disorder prevention programming through the Communities That Care Coalition, out of the Franklin Regional Council of Governments.
The money has also helped to pay for data collection from the Public Health Institute of Western Mass.
You can reach Joshua Solomon at:
jsolomon@recorder.com
413-772-0261, ext. 264