Community Education Group Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Group Receives ARC Grant To Strengthen Community Health

A new grant will help train and place community health workers to strengthen behavioral health systems in 20 W.Va. counties.

Last week, the Community Education Group (CEG) was awarded $7.7 million from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) for their new project, Help Our People Expand the Ecosystem (HOPEE).

This multistate initiative comes from the ARC’s Appalachian Regional Initiative for Stronger Economies (ARISE), which drives economic transformation through collaboration.

For their project, CEG will be working with the Kentucky Rural Health Association (KRHA), Shaping Our Appalachian Region (SOAR) Kentucky, the West Virginia-based SUD Collaborative (SUDC), and the Virginia Rural Health Association.

Together, CEG and their HOPEE project partners will work to train and place new community health workers to strengthen behavioral healthcare systems in a 56-county region. Twenty West Virginia counties will be included.

According to Executive Director of CEG, A. Toni Young, this project will expand on CEG’s community health worker training program, CHAMPS, which trains individuals with lived experience in substance use disorder recovery to become community health workers.

“So what we wanted to do is to take individuals from towns, hollers, communities networks, and say, if we trained you to do the HIV screening, trained you to do the hepatitis C screening, trained you to do motivational interviewing or networking, could we train people that folks knew and were comfortable with and could listen to,” Young said. “And those folks may be more willing to come back into the community or come back for treatment for HIV or screening for HIV, or for some sort of a medically assisted treatment and management before or some other behavioral health services.”

According to CEG, its overarching goal is to improve socioeconomic disparities in Appalachia while addressing pressing and overlapping syndemics eroding the region’s broader economy, workforce and health outcomes.

A syndemic is two or more illness states interacting poorly with each other and negatively influencing the mutual course of each disease trajectory.

“Many things coming into effect one person, or one community, or one town or one state, that we’re taking a syndemic approach,” Young said. “So rather than saying, we only want to talk to the individuals about substance use disorder, right, we only want to get them to that MAT (Medically Assisted Treatment) provider to deal with substance use, we don’t want to just do that. We want to get them to there to talk about HIV, and when get them there to talk about hepatitis C, and we want to get them there to talk about PrEP.”

CEG said it will work with its partners and health care and behavioral care providers, including Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) providers, will train, hire, and support community health workers. The project will build capacity in communities to address the substance use, HIV, and viral hepatitis syndemic and increase support and infrastructure for health care providers–all while providing coinciding workforce development and job training support.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Marshall Health.

Community Education Group Delivers Health Kits To Those In Need

The CEG is a non-profit organization with its base of operations in Lost River, West Virginia. The organization focuses on the “syndemic” or synergistic epidemic in Appalachia.

The Community Education Group’s (CEG) community health worker training program graduates and other volunteers recently gathered to assemble and distribute thousands of health kits to those in need.

The CEG is a non-profit organization with its base of operations in Lost River, West Virginia. The organization focuses on the “syndemic” or synergistic epidemic in Appalachia.

A syndemic is the aggregation of two or more concurrent epidemics or disease clusters in a population with interactions that exacerbate the burden of the disease. In West Virginia and Appalachia, those three primary diseases are substance use disorder, HIV and viral hepatitis.

As part of their mission to mitigate the effects of the syndemic, the CEG began CHAMPS, or Community Health and Mobilization Prevention Services. It works to train community health workers (CHW). They are frontline public health workers who are trusted members of the communities they serve.

“We do training on HIV, on substance use disorder, viral hepatitis, and then sort of the basic curriculum for a community health worker,” said Jason Lucas, CEG director of education. “So they provide a linkage to care for community members that otherwise may not have had that linkage and may not seek that care.”

In June, the CEG received nearly five tons of materials for health kits and asked program graduates in Kanawha County to help unload the truck and assemble the kits. The kits included hand sanitizer, compressed towels, reusable metal water bottles, health resource and contact cards, COVID-19 tests, as well as notebooks and pens that were delivered in drawstring backpacks to places of particular need.

“Out of 39 Kanawha and Clay county CHAMPS that we invited, 21 of them participated in at least one day of the three days,” Lucas said. “We had the one day about unloading, a day of building roughly and then the day of distribution. So those three days, better than 50 percent showed up for at least one day.”

Fifteen thousand health kits were assembled with 7,000 distributed in Boone, Clay, Kanawha, Lincoln, Logan, McDowell, Wyoming and Mingo counties.

Lucas said the best part of the project was letting the CHAMPS graduates take control of the distribution of the health kits.

“It was so cool to watch these kits go out and to see that and people were getting excited. They were coming back for more kits, like, they’re really excited about their successes,” Lucas said. “It was a cool experience.”

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.

W.Va. Group Begins Monkeypox Education Efforts In Appalachia

A West Virginia nonprofit group has been awarded $100,000 in grants for monkeypox vaccination and education efforts among LGTBQ individuals in 13 Appalachian states.

A West Virginia nonprofit group said Monday it has been awarded $100,000 in grants for monkeypox vaccination and education efforts among LGTBQ individuals in 13 Appalachian states.

The Community Education Group received $50,000 grants each from Gilead Sciences and ViiV Healthcare to develop and distribute materials, offer grants and hold meetings aimed at reducing cultural stigmas and barriers related to the virus, the group said in a statement.

CEG will create and distribute monkeypox digital resource guides to more than 300 Appalachian health departments, along with rural healthcare associations and LGBTQ groups.

CEG also will accept applications for mini-grants from organizations in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia, the statement said.

The virus has mainly spread among gay and bisexual men, though health officials continue to stress that anyone can be infected.

“One of the things that we realize with monkeypox is that we were asking people to have a conversation with a population of folks that they may not normally engage with,” CEG President and founder A. Toni Young said in a telephone interview. “And many of them want to have this conversation but just simply didn’t know how to.”

CEG wanted to be able to provide a toolkit “so that folks actually feel safe and free to access the care and services at our county health departments,” she said.

The Community Education Group, founded in 1994, is based in the Hardy County community of Lost City, with offices in Washington. It works to eliminate disparities in health outcomes and improve public health in disadvantaged populations and underserved communities.

New Grant Helps Expand Healthcare to Rural Communities

A free healthcare clinic in Morgantown has received funding to continue rural community outreach in five counties.

A free healthcare clinic in Morgantown has received funding to continue rural community outreach in five counties

Milan Puskar Health Right will use the $25,000 from the Community Education Group’s Appalachian Partnership Fund to continue mobile healthcare outreach to provide COVID-19 and flu vaccines, Hep-C and HIV tests, and other healthcare support in Marion, Monongalia, Preston, Taylor, and Upshur counties.

The Appalachian Partnership Fund is made possible with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Community Education Group (CEG) founder and executive director A. Toni Young says her organization usually focuses on substance use disorder, HIV and hepatitis across Appalachia.

“We’re looking at the HIV outbreak in West Virginia, the substance use disorder pan crisis that we’ve been experiencing, and the hepatitis C crisis,” Young said. “We call that a syndemic because we think that these things are linked.”

However, Young said CEG’s ultimate goal is to increase health resources for the most vulnerable people in the region.

“The true meaning of harm reduction is, A. meeting a person where they are, B. trying to figure out what are the services that we can offer to get you to enter into a health care system or get you to begin to think about your health in a different way,” Young said. “Maybe we can’t get you to take an HIV test today…but maybe what we can do is just get you to get a flu vaccine today.”

Community Education Group is also partnering with West Virginia Health Right in Charleston. Young said that during the pandemic, CEG received $3.5 million from the CDC, from which they were able to grant $1 million. This year, only $500,000 was secured after Congress cut COVID-19 spending.

“We’re trying to figure out how to augment and support our partners,” Young said.

Part of that support, she said, is to bring more resources into the state and into the region, especially with a potentially serious flu season on the horizon.

“We’ve had two years where the flu has really kind of been dormant,” Young said. “We don’t know kind of how it is that the flu is going to manifest itself now. So I’m going to encourage everybody to get their flu vaccination. It’s a family affair, whether you’re young or whether you’re old, whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor, everybody should be able to get access to flu vaccination.”

Education Group Receives Grant To Combat HIV Outbreak In W.Va.

A West Virginia organization called Community Education Group was recently awarded $500,000 to combat the spread of HIV in the state.

West Virginia is currently experiencing its fourth HIV outbreak in three years, driven by the state’s ongoing opioid crisis. The grant from Gilead Sciences will enable the organization to coordinate community response to the state’s growing HIV crisis by funding programs that use an integrated approach to preventing HIV, viral hepatitis and opioid usage.

Since the spike in HIV cases is connected with injection drug use, the Community Education Group plans to work with established regional coalitions that are already addressing the opioid epidemic. The organization’s goal is to integrate HIV education, training and policy development into ongoing community efforts. At the same time the organization hopes to build an overarching statewide coalition to mobilize advocates, researchers, policymakers and experts to meet with legislators and contribute to future planning for leveraging federal resources.