HEALTH ASSET MAPPING OF CITY TO BEGIN TONIGHT

The Healthy Community Committee will outline its asset mapping process tonight as part of its community health assessment.

The meeting starts at 6 p.m. at the Salvation Army, 701 Good Hope. The public is welcome.

Four or five neighborhoods in Cape Girardeau have been identified as starting points for the mapping process, said Shirley Ramsey, executive coordinator of the Community Caring Council, which is spearheading the assessment.

The neighborhoods will be canvassed to determine what resources are available in terms of services, business and people, she said.

"We'll be mapping out where the assets are, and by doing that we'll be able to identify where the gaps are in the community," Ramsey said.

The committee kicked off its assessment process last month. As part of that kickoff, several concerns about community health were identified, said Charlotte Craig, director of the Cape Girardeau County Public Health Center and a partner in the assessment.

"The No. 1 problem identified that night by the group was community and family values," she said.

As the neighborhood canvass begins, Craig said, residents may identify other strengths and weaknesses.

"We intend to address what these neighborhoods have to offer each other," she said. "What are their strong points? What talented people live in these neighborhoods? What are their talents? We have to do the asset mapping before we can even begin to solve these problems. We also need to know what the problems are."

Because the community will ultimately determine how its health assets can be best utilized and how its concerns can be best addressed, it is important that the entire community participate in the assessment process, Craig said.

"We want Grandma Sally to participate as well as her granddaughter Jane," she said. "We want business people. We want hospital people. We want the chamber. We want law enforcement. We want the university."

Ramsey agreed that the process will be community-driven. "We can't say what the community's needs are; the community themselves have to determine what their needs are," she said.

Ramsey and Craig both stressed that while the initial canvassing will be done in Cape Girardeau, the process will expand throughout the county.

"The full intention is to eventually include the entire county," Craig said. "(The canvass) will in no way exclude the cities of Jackson, Whitewater, Delta, you name it."

Committee members are working on the types of survey questions to be asked, she said.

The Healthy Community Committee membership consists of the Community Caring Council, the Cape Girardeau Chamber of Commerce, the Cape Girardeau County Area Medical Society, the county public health center, St. Francis Medical Center, Southeast Missouri Hospital and Southeast Missouri State University. The committee is working in partnership with CHART (Community Health Assessment Resource Team), a state initiative to assess and ultimately improve health at the community level.