High Rocks Greenbrier County Health Alliance Partnership

The Greenbrier County Health alliance (GCHA) is sponsored by the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine, Center for Rural and Community Health with grant funding from West Virginia Clinical Translational Science Institute. The GCHA's mission is to empower all local communities in Greenbrier County to improve health through community action and innovative programming.

An Alliance core planning group began meeting monthly in October 2014 to develop a shared process for networking collaboratively to define issues and consensus on intervention activities. The group agreed that interventions would intend to improve health and well-being of country residents by focusing on 4 major action areas: socioeconomic factors, physical environment, health behaviors and clinical partnerships.

Simultaneously, the planning group developed an organizational structure to become a non-profit organization and received non-profit designation in November 2015. A newly established board of directors and 4 task force work plans have been defined to: (1) Expand the community ambassador program; (2) Increase capacity and create a network of supports to sustain evidence based self-management community workshops; (3) Develop a digital asset map of county health resources; (4) and Aggregate local foods to help meet local needs.

A key component to the Alliance coordinated approach for the community health outreach is the use of community ambassadors. Ambassadors are identified because they have an interest in improving their communities¿ health. In 2015, five communities participated by identifying local ambassadors who became trained to identify a local need and implement a mini-grant project. Mini-grant projects occurred across the county and these help define pathways for future coordination of grassroots engagement.