Community Programs and Well-being

On Tuesday, June 23rd, we had a full day of learning about community programs within Wallowa County. We started out visiting the Stewardship Center, the old hospital building that Wallowa Resources purchased and now rents out spaces for various community resources and programs. We visited the Building Healthy Families program and the Alternative School. It was interesting because we got to hear all about their programs to help children as well as the 4 day school week that the schools within the county operate on. On Fridays, the children have the day off from school, but they have opportunities for extra curricular programs including a robotics club, a natural resources program put on by Wallowa Resources, and sporting events because they have to drive quite a ways to get to the other schools that they are competing against.

Next, we got to go visit the new hospital that was built in Enterprise. The CEO and administrator, Larry Davy met with us to tell us about what the hospital meant to the community. He was actually a very nice and funny guy and seemed to be passionate about the work he was doing. An interesting technological development within the hospital was the ability to utilize telemedicine, or robots within the hospital and clinic that allow a physician in another location to control it, giving the opportunity for specialized examinations without high transportation costs. He also talked about how he believed that the health care system within the United States was only disease care and didn’t really make people healthy. He is working on incorporating preventative care into their work and putting a lot of effort into educating the community saying “the better we do our job, the less patient volume we’re going to have” and “the most ethical thing we can do is to reduce the need for disease care” (Davy).

Following our time at the hospital, we visited the Community Connections program. This facility operates a number of community systems catering to the elderly, veterans, and low income individuals. They operate a food bank 5 days a week, offer energy credits and firewood for low income families, offer transportation opportunities including a public transportation bus, medical transportation, a shopping bus and veteran transportation, provide meals to senior citizens 3 days per week, and run a meals on wheels program. Overall, this facility offers many different programs to help people that are struggling within this community get by.

Next, we went back to the Stewardship Center, where we met in our groups and planned out which other individuals within the community that we wanted to talk to. My group (the food and agriculture group) decided that we had heard a lot from well off individuals, but hadn’t had the chance to hear from any of the lower income community members. We decided we would walk around Enterprise for a while. We stopped in at a local thrift shop and talked with some of the local volunteers, visited a local bookstore, and met with an individual that was sitting on a bench along the road. We got to hear a little different perspective on the county from these individuals and get a better understanding of the lives of the not so well off people that live in the area.

Upon returning to camp, we decided to go for a short hike before dinner. Ryoko and I decided to bail when we got to the wilderness area, returned to camp and watched Mulan (because Ryoko had never seen it). Included below are the groups pictures from the rest of their hike:

Following the adventures, we had dinner back at the lodge and then met around a campfire as a class to check in on everyone’s progress and be sure that everyone was on the same page. It was nice to get to hear everyone’s progress towards their papers and see how we were all interpreting the information that we had been receiving into individual syntheses.