The State We're In

This episode focuses on the great work of Healthy Together Willmar, and their mission to help create a future where all members of the Willmar, MN community have access to the resources and opportunities needed to achieve their best possible health.

In Willmar, achieving good health is met with considerable barriers, which are often experienced most by an increasingly diverse and aging population. To address some of these barriers, the Healthy Together Willmar initiative launched the Idea Fund, creating an opportunity for community members to submit ideas to affect change.

Now in its second round of funding, more than $264,000 was awarded to community groups in Willmar to offer support and solutions related to physical, mental and behavioral health, community connections, access to dental care, the availability of culturally based childcare and more.

The Idea Fund process kicked off in the fall of 2018, with residents attending a “progressive dinner,” community meals at homes throughout Willmar, where they engaged in conversations about how to address the community’s barriers to health. From there, ideas were submitted to the Willmar Community Table, which is comprised of diverse residents who have firsthand experience facing barriers to health.

Find more information about Healthy Together Willmar and the idea fund here.

As the vaping epidemic continues in Minnesota, we bring you a preview of our upcoming video documentary: stories from the people on the front lines of this fight against big tobacco.

The 2019 Minnesota Student Survey found more than a quarter of Minnesota 11th-graders and 11 percent of 8th-graders used an e-cigarette in the past month. From 2016-2019, the 8th-grade vaping rate nearly doubled.

The commercial tobacco industry uses flavors to attract these kids. Two thirds of current high-school tobacco users in Minnesota reported using a flavored product.

The deliberate marketing tactics used by the tobacco industry have made vaping popular among youth. The Minnesota Student Survey also found that Eighty-eight percent of Minnesota high-school students are exposed to e-cigarette ads. Investigations have revealed e-cigarette maker JUUL targeted kids as young as eight with marketing including a summer camp, school programs and social media influencers. The state of Minnesota has sued JUUL Labs for illegally advertising to youth and engaging in deceptive practices.

Flavored tobacco products are driving the youth nicotine epidemic, which has erased nearly two decades of progress to reduce youth tobacco use. The alarming rise of youth vaping goes hand-in-hand with the insidious impact of predatory marketing the commercial tobacco industry has targeted at marginalized communities – including African Americans, American Indians, and LGBTQ people.

In the podcast we’ll hear from Laura Smith, Senior Public Affairs Manager at ClearWay Minnesota.

Will Gitler and Claire Hering share their personal experiences with vaping. These experiences led them to join local action and advocacy work to reverse this epidemic and protect the health of all Minnesotans.

Watch for more on vaping epidemic in our upcoming documentary, where we continue with these conversations. We’ll also explore how vaping is impacting Native American youth from the Lower Sioux Indian Community and how tribal leaders are addressing the problem. We’ll learn more about the serious health impacts of vaping from Dr. Brook Moore, a pediatric pulmonologist at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota.

In this episode we explore Belonging and Othering, and what it means to belong to a community, to a society, to one another, inspired by the work of John A. Powell from the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, and author of the book Othering and Belonging.

We’ll have frank conversations about what it means to feel ‘othered,’ and the health implications for when systems are created and perpetuated to other groups of people, and how this leads to the serious gaps in access to health and wellbeing in the state of Minnesota. And what we can do to build connections in our communities to start to alleviate these gaps.

We bring you a special episode on coping and mental health in the times of COVID-19. This pandemic is forcing us to change our lives in ways we never imagined. Supporting and caring for one another is more important than ever, and we’re doing it in new ways.

Everyone reacts to stressful situations differently. We had the opportunity to get some advice from community leaders, teachers, and behavioral health professionals about strategies for coping and taking care of each other during this time.

We bring you a special episode on declaring structural racism as a public health crisis, in the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.

Whether at the hands of police or because of pervasive inequities built into the fabric of our society, Black and brown people are dying at disproportionately high rates compared to white people. Systemic and structural racism in housing, health care, employment and healthy food access is resulting in Latinos and Blacks being three times as likely to be infected with COVID-19 as their white counterparts and twice as likely to die of the virus as white people.

We spoke with three community leaders on why naming structural racism as a public health crisis is crucial and what comes after the acknowledgement.