A $500,000 grant could be the saving grace for the overall health of Geary County – but the entire community has to work together.

Susie Bilderback, Food Policy Council Chair-Elect, said that the Pathways to Healthy Kansas Grant could be a great thing for the community.

“It’s a $500,000 grant, so it’s big money, but it’s not something that we can just do anything we want to with; [they] have a pretty prescribed way of how they want us to use things,” said Bilderback. “[The grant focuses on] three main areas – healthy living/healthy eating, physical activity and smoking cessation.”

In recent months, local residents have been inundated with reports on the food insecurity in the county, but Bilderback said the desperate state of overall health goes beyond those statistics.

“We also are the number one tobacco use of adults in the state, we also tie second for the most use of alcohol and on top of that we have a lot of high rankings in health behaviors and issues; so we are a very needy community at this point,” said Bilderback.

Recipients of the grant will be notified on June 30th. Last year Geary County competed against 80 other communities unsuccessfully.

“We will know whether or not we’re going to get a site visit by the end of May…we did get a site visit last year, so hopefully we will get one again this year, they’ll go to 15 different communities for the site visits,” said Bilderback. “When they come here to do that [site visit], we’re asking our partners to come out with us…they’re going to walk to visit with the community, and talk to people and see what their intent is, and how they are going to be willing to make this work.”

Bilderback noted that the grant committee wants to see “community readiness” before awarding the funding.

“They don’t want to just see Live Well Geary County applying for this, they want to see [us] backed by the whole community; and should we receive the grant it will take the whole community to make the grant work [for us all].” 

The grant is divided into seven pathways:  community policy, resident community well being, food retail, healthcare, restaurants, schools and work-site wellness.

“We would be working with each of those [pathways] and after they had done some preliminary work, they would also be able to receive some of that funding,” said Bilderback. “It’s kind of an all encompassing grant and I just see as being just what we’re needing right now.”

The Food Policy Council is a subgroup of Live Well Geary County.