WILTON – Healthy Community Coalition has been awarded a $75,000 grant over three years from the Bingham Foundation to partner with the Community Health Education Program at the University of Maine at Farmington to address the workforce and leadership challenges emerging as part of developing the public health infrastructure across Maine.

The Maine Network of Healthy Communities has been a leader in establishing competencies and performance standards for comprehensive community health coalitions and ensuring that coalitions have a strong role in Maine’s local public health infrastructure.

Healthy Community Coalition in Farmington is working in partnership with University of Maine at Farmington’s Community Health Education Program to help develop the workforce for the future of coalitions.

HCC is initiating a community health workforce development board to offer its involvement, ideas and contributions. It will be co-chaired by Dennis Kamholtz, EdD, chairman of the Community Health Education Program at UMF and a member of HCC’s board of directors, and Healthy Community Coalition’s certified health education specialist, Nicole Ditata. Ditata is a community health education graduate of UMF.

Kamholtz said, “Faculty members in the UMF Community Health Degree Program have recently revised the curriculum to reflect national standards regarding the credentialing of certified health education specialists. This process has been ongoing to ensure consistency with what is happening at the national level. Input from the board will augment the preparatory process for our students as they get ready to enter Maine’s workforce, which includes comprehensive community health coalitions.”

Board members include Mary Jane Bush, Alyce Cavanaugh, Jerry Cayer, Margaret Farmer, Rick Fortier, Vicki Foster, Laurie Gardner, Joanne Joy, Dennis Kamholtz, Nicole Ditata, Leah Binder, Kala Ladenheim, Robert Leib, Lisa Laflin, Dawn Littlefield, Maurice Martin, Natalie Morse, Nate Morse, Anne Rogers, Karen Rogers, Lee Scott, Stephanie Swan, Ellie Udeh and Angela Westhoff.

The board will advise on curriculum elements as they relate to coalition core competencies and performance standards, internship opportunities, leadership development and what is needed to assure qualified people hear about opportunities.

Ditata said, “This is an exciting time to work with UMF and other groups across the state to ensure that all CCHCs have a qualified workforce to improve the health of Maine people.”

The project will involve collaboration with University of Maine at Farmington, the Maine Network of Healthy Communities, the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as two Maine area health education centers (AHEC), part of a national program dedicated to promotion of the health professions, the Ben Franklin Center at Franklin Memorial Hospital and the Maine Center for Public Health.

“Through collaboration with HCC and the Community Health Workforce Development Project, FMH will be able to broaden its scope of practice in meeting the mission of AHEC, which is to increase access and participation in programs leading to new or expanded health careers in the rural population,” stated board member Karen Rogers, director of education, Franklin Memorial Hospital.

Dora Anne Mills, director of the Maine CDC, said, “The state has been actively engaged in integrating CCHCs as key components of the local public health infrastructure. We appreciate this effort to focus on workforce development that will make these coalitions as strong as possible in the future.”

The project is made possible by the Bingham Program, which is a charitable endowment established in 1932 to promote health and advance medicine in Maine.