Health Summit Plans Party to Say Goodbye

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Created on Wednesday, 18 September 2024 15:07

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By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
    A public celebration of the legacy of the Sitka Health Summit Coalition and a goodbye party for the organization will be held Thursday evening as the group concludes its 17 years of advocating for local causes such as housing for the homeless, a farmers market, and fish in school meals.
    The coalition held its first summit in 2007, with founding members setting a goal of making Sitka a walkable and bikeable community.

Doug Osborne leads a group of bicyclists down Lincoln Street during the Kidical Mass family bike ride in 2015. Getting a Bicycle Friendly designation was one of the goals of the Sitka Health Summit. (Sentinel File Photo)

    “It started as a bridge-building exercise between the two hospitals, and just expanded to kind of bridge-building between lots of different groups in town, but the common ground being health,” founding member Doug Osborne recalled in an interview. Those hospitals were the SEARHC Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center and Sitka Community Hospital, which no longer exists.
    Formerly a SEARHC employee, Osborne now works with Sitka Tribe of Alaska.
    In 2008, the summit set the formation of a farmer’s market as an objective, and that program continues today. Other initiatives endorsed by the Health Summit have included a fish to schools project piloted by the Sitka Conservation Society, a disability-accessible playground, the Cloud teen center in downtown Sitka, and a mural painted on the side of Blatchley Middle School, organized by Sitkans Against Family Violence.
    “Sitka Conservation Society has historically been a member of the coalition,” SCS community catalyst Chandler O’Connell told the Sentinel. “And we also, like many organizations in town, have ended up hosting these community-identified goals. That includes fish to schools, the Sitka of local food assessments and CO2 reducers group, which led, in many ways, to the Sitka Carbon Offset Fund, and lots of a shared membership with Transition Sitka.”
    O’Connell said the coalition’s aim was to bring community organizations and partners together to achieve a common goal from the bottom up.
    “I see the history of the Health Summit as the history of collaboration between community organizations, but also, more importantly, just a demonstration of the power of grassroots action to make our community healthier and to really transform the landscape here in Sitka. And there are so many examples of that, from the Choose Respect mural at Blatchley, the community playground, to the Sitka Farmers Market, which is going strong today,” O’Connell said.
    Though the coalition is disbanding after Thursday’s meeting, O’Connell said its work is far from over.
    “All this work that’s been done collectively by community members and by the coalition will definitely continue,” she said. “And I also think that that’s why we want to take a minute and pause and celebrate and reflect on what’s been done, so that we can take that energy and inspiration, and people can feel empowered to keep working to make Sitka healthier.”
    Recently, SHSC put its support behind the Sitka Homeless Coalition and backed the construction of small cabins for the unhoused on Jarvis Street.
    “Just a couple years ago, there was building cabins for people without houses up on Jarvis Street,” Osborne said. “And that’s in the construction phase, and the other one was to bring back a Parks and Recreation Community Schools program, and that happened.”
    The coalition’s final initiative in 2023 was to advocate for increased access to child care in Sitka.
    Osborne was a founding member of the coalition and has been active in the organization through the years. The Sitka Health Summit Coalition is disbanding, he said, as circumstances have shifted over time.
    “Dynamics have changed, personnel. It just ran its course... There’s no more community hospital,” he said.
    The coalition disbursed thousands of dollars of grant money to its initiatives over the nearly two decades of its work, and at Thursday’s event it will distribute $12,000 to causes identified in prior years. Those recipients haven’t yet been announced, Osborne said.
    “The Health Summit basically was a fire starter. It was ‘OK, let’s take an idea, let’s make a community goal,’” Osborne said. “Give it some media attention, as much as we can; give a couple thousand to start off; do the facilitation of the first meeting; give a little support as we can; give a letter for their grant, stuff like that. It really was just a fire starting thing… So at this celebration, we’re going to be doing a lot of thanking the fire tenders.”
    The celebration, with a meal included, is open to the public, and will be held 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday in Room 229 of the University of Alaska Southeast campus on Japonski Island.
    “It’s truly going to be a celebration,” Osborne said. “That’s the main thing, it’s the chance to look back and reflect and celebrate everything that’s happened and just kind of feel good about what our little town has done. So I think with all the Health Summit stuff, there was always a big element of promoting enthusiasm and that is inspiring and exciting.”

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