Hi everybody. We're here in Fauquier County, Virginia in the county seat, Warrenton, right here on Main Street. We're here today because I'm introducing the Fauquier healthy town panel, which will be moderated by Kirsten Duek from the PATH Foundation. Today you're going to be hearing from leading experts in the area of lowering health risks and securing public health. Enjoy. Hi and welcome to our healthy towns panel, featuring the town of Warrenton. I'm Kirsten Duek, I'm a senior program officer with the PATH Foundation, a community-based grant-making foundation dedicated to strengthening the health and vitality of our community. We are based in Warrenton, Virginia, which is the focus of today's panel. With me is a wonderful panel of local actors, people involved in the non-profit community, in local governance, in education, we will be talking about the ways we work together to strengthen the health and vitality of our communities. So I will turn it to each of our speakers to introduce themselves and tell you a little bit about what they do. In order, let's go to Kristen McAuliffe. Hello, my name is Kristen McAuliffe and I am the supervisor of the FRESH program here for Fauquier county public schools. FRESH stands for Fauquier Reaches for Excellence in School Health. We are the recipients of a PATH [inaudible] with a mission to inspire and promote healthy choices in our schools and in our community. Right. Thanks, Megan. Hi, I'm Megan Catalfamo, I am the leadership and service coordinator for Highland school, a pre-K through 12 independent school based in Warrenton, the best-served students from seven counties in the region. I teach a leadership studies course and I oversee the service requirement that our upper school students have. Wonderful, Chris? Hi there, I'm Chris Forsten. My family owns and operates the Old Town Athletic Campus here in Warrenton. My division specifically is the divergent performance entity that is on campus. My specialty is working with youth, as young as four or five years old all the way through college athletes, typically. Bob? I'm Rob Marino, I'm the director of the Fauquier Free Clinic. We are a charity health care clinic providing primary care, dental care, and mental health care to low-income families in the community. So folks under 200 percent of poverty, either completely uninsured or in the last couple of years, pulse-width Medicaid. With a record of between 1500 and 2000 people a year here at our program. Thanks. Daryl. Hi, my name is Daryl Neher, I am the CEO for Fauquier Habitat for Humanity. We're Fauquier County and Rappahannock County and our mission is to focus on housing needs for our service area and specifically serving populations between 30 percent and 60 percent of area median income. We have a variety of programming that helps stabilize housing situations, as well as putting people into new homes, and I'm glad to be a part of this panel. Thanks. Brandie? Hi, I'm Brandie Schaeffer. I'm the town manager for Warrenton. We are a town located in Fauquier county. We are the county seat right in the heart of the county. My background a little bit comes from planning. As I rolled into the town manager role, I've brought some of that perspective to the built environment. So that is a little bit about that. Fantastic. I get the pleasure of introducing Warrenton itself, which is as much of a character and contributor to this panel as any of us on the screen today. Warrenton is a small town in North Central Virginia, about 40 miles west of Washington DC, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's close-knit and there's a culture of collaboration, which I think is one key to its culture of health. As we talk about healthy towns today, we're not just talking about health care or the absence of disease, we're also talking about things like social determinants of health. Those conditions and policies that support or hinder healthy living and healthy communities, including housing, education, equitable access to care, and to recreation opportunities across age, race, and income. Let's start our discussion with that framing of health. Rob Marino, you are with the Fauquier Free Clinic, how can a medical community thinking differently about health and move away from problem-focused care and toward prevention? Well, this is a problem here, the same as it is everywhere in this country. I think we've done a pretty good job of addressing some of those things. I've been at this clinic for 27 years. I work with physicians and dentists and mental health clinicians. I'm married to a doctor, so I think I'm an amateur observer of clinicians and how they think and work. I think people go into the health care profession because they are problem-solvers. When they're presented with a problem, they want to do something and take action. Our whole model is to put one patient at a time in front of the doctor, then they try and deal with what's happened. Over time you start to lose track of what happened before that patient ever got to the room. I know every doctor in the world wants to be great at their job, but we really set them up terribly when we have a whole model that creates that situation. By the time the patient has gotten in front of them, the language barrier is the core nutrition, family social problems, all of these things have already happened and now we presented the doctor with an impossible problem half of the time. One thing that's really made a difference here in our clinic and in our community, is an idea about integrating care. We have dental care here in this building and primary care doctors and mental health clinicians. This community really has a lack of those kinds of resources, and so, we've used telehealth options to try to bring things together. But really it's pretty unique to be able to see a dentist and walk down stairs and see somebody and talk about your blood pressure. We try and use all those different doors here, to hook people into the system. We go out to the schools and we do dental screenings and we see any five kids come across the auditorium stage. Maybe that family's access to health care happens that way, because we get the kid to come in and talk about their dental care. Pretty soon when the dentist is talking to that kid and the parents, then we find out about health care needs they have. We really try and be creative and find every way we can to just connect people into the system. It's limited, but we have to get two people where they live before they got to the room. Like I said, all of those things really have to be addressed. Can you tell us a little bit more about some of the barriers to equitable access to health care in this community? Like I said, we share these problems with the whole country. There's inequity by race, but also by income. People who we call them the big two, the predictors of somebody's health and their access to health care. The two of them matter our insurance status and having a primary care doctor. When lots of people are uninsured, then those people are left out. In our community, it's a pretty big rural community that we serve. Warrenton is a small town, but we're the hub of a pretty big county and there is transportation challenges, there's a concentration of poverty in the southern end of our county, that's not where the health care is. There's one hospital that service this whole region and it's right here in Warrenton. I think that causes all kinds of structural problems that we forget. Because people need to take off work, they need to travel to get the care. This last year with all of our challenges we've covered, we've had some neat solutions bringing telehealth and resources to people a little further away. I hope that these things don't go away. I think we're going to persist in a lot of these different ways to bring care to people. But when somebody doesn't have a primary care doctor or they can't name that person, that's a problem. When they can't afford health care, that's a problem. Until two years ago we had no Medicaid expansion for adults in this state, that was seismic for us. We've made a lot of effort the last two years. A lot of the people are on this call with me trying to educate and bring people into the system who have been left out before. Can you briefly share an example of one of the successes where that integrative or collaborative approach has paid off or has impacted someone's health? There are countless examples of that, I'll talk about mental-health. That's been something that's been lacking in this community for a long time. If you look at just the numbers of clinicians that serve this community versus the population, we have a real terrible shortage. I don't understand, or I can't understand why mental health is somehow separate from the other kinds of health care, but it is. People get sick, and so when we bring people in here and we talk to them about their stomach pain and their constant headaches and their shortness of breath, it turns out that anxiety. We have now, the opportunity. My doctor is in the room with our patient and says, "You've been to the ER six times for this headache and for the shortness of breath and his feeling of dread, I don't think there's a physical problem here". Takes him by the elbow and walk down the hall and talk to our mental health clinician and say, "We're going to connect you and see if we can do something a little different and stop this cycle where you're suffering and you're seeking care in a place that they can't really help you". When that happens here once a week, it's really great to see. I knew over the years you have taught me a lot about that role of follow-up and in particular, the need for a place where that follow-up can happen, a stable place to receive care and received follow-up. So I want to put it Daryl, and ask you to explain to us a little bit about that relationship between housing and health and where habitat comes in on the equation. Christine, that's a great question. Housing and its connection to health really can be categorized in four ways focusing around issues of stability, the safety and quality of the home itself, also discussing issues of affordability and ultimately as well the location or neighborhood that the home is located. Stability is one of the, I think it's one of the obvious issues that is connected to health and that's focusing on. If you don't have a home or you don't know how long you're going to be in a home, it's really connected to issues of mental health for homeowners and renters. The idea that you may be displaced has a connection to issues of depression, and anxiety, alcohol abuse. For teens it ends up being the connection to teen pregnancy, drug abuse, and depression and a lot of other factors if we think about long-term impacts. If you're moving regularly from rental units, to rental unit, to rental units, from community to community, to community, you're also disrupting education, which perpetuates the cycle that we're talking about, and so that stability becomes foundational in what we try to do. We're trying to stabilize those housing situations. Where we directly have an impact, there's often around the quality and safety of the homes. You consider that the quality of the home, issues about mold, construction and other problems; leaky roofs, window drafts, and plumbing, it leads to issues of asthma, lead poisoning, unintended injuries. When you look and you say you've got six million substandard units of housing in the United States, you get an understanding of just how prevalent quality and safety issues are for the housing industry. Affordability, it's even worse, 38.9 million Americans who own homes are paying 30 percent of their income or more for their housing needs. Of that number, 18.8 million are paying more than 50 percent of their income on housing needs and that connection if you think about it, if your housing costs increase, your discretionary income falls and so you have to make choices as a family as to what you're going to do. Then the top two choices that families make, the food that they buy and the access to medical care, they'll either just avoid it or defer it, and illnesses become worse. In the final pieces is an issue around where the location or the neighborhood the home is built. Proximity to essential services like health care, like schools are essential for families who are on the lower end of the income spectrum. But what you find is oftentimes affordable housing is pushed further and further away from those essential services, which make the access to all of the services that we're talking about really problematic. So those are the foundations of some of the issues that we at Habitat for Humanity try to tackle. So you talked about housing quality, affordability, and location. What are some of the innovations that Fauquier Habitat is introducing to address this? Sure. When we look at the housing continuum, we're really trying to tackle. Because if you don't look at the continuum of housing, you can lead to a variety of problems within a community. That looks at issues of homelessness, all the way up to market rate housing, and rental and affordable housing in the middle. We're trying to tackle it all systemically through a lot of our education programs that we're launching here at Fauquier Habitat. We're talking about working with individual families on understanding their finances and budgeting. Those conversations can lead directly to healthier choices and outcomes in their families situation. I've seen families who when they go through this budgeting process, you can see why did you stop at this gas station and why are you spending $12 every day? It turns out that's where they would stop for breakfast before the kids would go to school and just asking questions, not forcing anything upon anybody. Well, have you ever thought that with these dollars you could actually buy eggs, cereal, and eat at home before you leave? The best story I've ever had was a family that did that and talked about how transformation it was with their family dynamic, not just their nutrition, that they were adding into their homes, into their families. We also cover mortgage process, home maintenance, good neighbor policies, and healthy choices of over 12 to 15 months to help address some of these issues. We're also looking at ways to scale the housing that we're doing, and that's looking at issues with partnerships. We're partnering with the Benevolent Fund at [inaudible] county to do critical Home Repair in Fauquier and [inaudible] county, and we're looking at getting into rentals as part of the equation because we know that there is a need for affordable rental housing in Fauquier county. Finally, and I think this is the most important part that we're doing on the scaling piece; our partnerships. Our ability to do our work, necessitates our collaboration with the town of Warrenton. Then you think about some of the driving barriers to affordable housing or else oftentimes zoning issues, and I appreciate the way the town of Warrenton has brought us to the table in these conversations to look at the comprehensive plan, how does affordability get addressed. Ultimately, we're moving down the road, the comprehensive plan has passed. Is looking at how the zoning laws can be passed and implemented to help more affordable housing into our community. Probably the most innovative piece we're doing is a community land trust. We were looking at launching this land trusts here in Fauquier county in a Fauquier habitat. But those conversations morphed and we're on the verge of announcing the launch of a statewide land trust for every habitat affiliate in the State of Virginia. What that does, that allows us to stop the cycle of affordable housing going to full market-rate housing, we placed the home in the Land Trust connected to some shared equity policies, and this 0.4 for every home that we build, it will remain affordable for the life of the home. Those are some of the ways that we're doing affordable housing and addressing these issues which will have a direct impact on the health and well-being of the families that we serve. You're really talking about a generational impact, I remember in a meeting a year ago, you walking me through really powerfully what it means for a childhood, stable housing means for a child, for example, their likelihood that they will stay in school and complete school. I want to turn to those educators on our panel and talk a little bit about the role that schools play in fostering healthy communities. Kristen, the program that you lead fresh is a countywide integrated school wellness program built on three pillars, nutrition, community engagement, and movement throughout the day. Can you give us an overview of how each of these elements shows up in the Fresh Program and are helping the schools re-imagine their culture of help not only within the school community but in the broader community? Sure, I'd love to. We as the Fresh Program collaborate with the school system and also with our community partners to get children up and moving throughout the day, we work with the classroom teachers on incorporating active learning lessons and tying movement to the curriculum, we work and offer clubs such as mileage and sports, both within the school setting before, during and after the school day, but then we also provide those opportunities out in the community for our children who may have transportation issues, they may not be able to get home from the clubs on the weekends what we do is we piggyback off of community events, in fact, we've joined up with a couple of you all on the panel and providing movement activities at things such as the farmers market or different kid days that are sponsored by parks and rec. Then in the summer is when we take the lead on some of the movement activities out in the community and we invite the community partners to come and help us and we just provide activities to get children actively engaged throughout the summer because we know that that's a time when they're not necessarily in school but yet we still want to get them moving, we want to provide them with access to nutritious meals and keep them reading and engaged throughout the summer. Those are some of the ways that we get children up and moving, as far as the nutrition aspect of our component like many school systems are working on farm to school initiatives. We know that through repeated exposure to fresh fruits and vegetables, we can positively impact the health of our students, and we hope that those habits will then become lifelong for our students. We work collaboratively with the School Nutrition Department and helping them incorporate scratch recipes that incorporate fresh produce into our cafeterias and we're fortunate that we actually have a chef as part of our fresh team and she works with the School Nutrition Department directly helping them develop and fill test recipes, she provides training opportunities for our nutrition staff and also professional development opportunities for them. She provides education to both our students and our staff, the FCPS staff on different seasonal produce that's available within our community and she also assists with the marketing of the new menu items. We've talked on getting the kids moving, we've talked about getting the kids healthy but the reality is we need our community to make this happen and we all would have worked together on various projects that the Fresh Program has been working on, our vision for the Fresh Program is a united community that maximizes opportunities for active learning and for healthy eating and really we need our community to be able to provide the equity and access to our students. We can't do it alone as the schools, we really need all of you and our community as a whole. A few years back I was looking to start a summer engagement program to get our kids up and moving and get them access, a lot of our students rely on us for their meals and so we were trying to come up with some type of program where we could reach our students throughout the summer and a group of us just got together just from different agencies, both for-profit and non-profit just to brainstorm, what would this look like for our community. I think it really changed the way I operated and it really impacted those at the table as well because what we began to see and I think what you're hearing here is there's a lot of overlap in what we do and we began to realize ways that we could really work more collaboratively and really maximize the resources that we have available to us. Prime example, Rob's group came out to one of our events and provided health screenings, Megan students, she'll talk later, but her students came and volunteered and helped get our kids, not only did they help with the movement activities, but then they also helped with feeding our children, this summer we were running out of food and they put together snow day kits. As these different groups started to come together and we started to maximize the resources that were available, we also started connecting each other and saying, "hey, try this group, try that group", and ultimately what has happened from these relationships is we afford a childhood wellness coalition and we've gone from just a brainstorm a couple years ago to now a group that meets monthly to talk about how can we best serve our children? How can we support the health and well-being of children on our community? I'm super thankful to have this community and access to all of these great resources that we have. That's so great. I recall that when Fresh was first conceived. Now, more than half a decade ago, six or seven years ago. School administrators were responding at least in part, to growing concern across the country about long sit times and reduced physical activity, and you've talked about how Fresh has incorporated that really has has changed the child experience, their student experience during the day. Chris Forsten give us the big picture, why is exercise important for you and how active are Americans? Thanks for the opportunity. I hope I don't state the obvious here. I don't think it can be overstated. The importance of exercise and these healthy habits that we're discussing here. There's loads of evidence all over the place, it doesn't matter what organization that you read it from, it is so known at this point that exercise is important in reducing our risk of major illnesses such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer. Research also shows that regular physical activity can boost our self-esteem, our mood, sleep quality, makes us less prone to stress, depression, dementia. We obviously have this major hurdle that's developed over the last couple of decades with the increased use of technology or social media. Trying to really encourage people to understand some limits within social media and understanding that getting out, being active, living that healthy lifestyle that we've talked about for years and years, it simply can't be overstated, the importance of what that means and what that means for our quality of life over time. I think one of the biggest things to state here is that, again, research indicates that inactive children are likely to become inactive adults, so laying that foundation early on, it's so important as we create these habits and hope that our youth take that through the rest of their days. Because as much as we can, we want everyone in our communities to live as quality lives as possible. Again stating some of factors here including fitness is also giving us an opportunity to socialize in a great environment. It increases concentration, it improves academic scores. We're going to build a stronger bones, healthier muscles, it's encouraging positive healthy growth and development, improving posture and balance, lowering stress. The factors and the variables here, it's so overwhelming, it's such a necessary thing, all of us agree. Again, there's no question about it, it has to be done. How are we doing it? How active are American youth and American future adults? It's an unfortunate statistic. In the 2018 US report card on physical activity for children and youths, scored us a D minus. Approximately 24 percent of children ages 6-17 years are going through about 60 minutes of exercise a day. If we could get that number up, my gosh, again, just little by little, lot by lot, whatever it's going to take. Only 24 percent of our youth are getting the amount of exercise that they need, at least on paper. I mean, I think it can even be more, it's not a whole lot to ask, but we're not getting the results that we need. I'm so glad I worked out before this panel and I can look you in the eye. What are some the healthy habits that may be overlooked? It amazes me that, even in my setting, where I am constantly encouraging our kids here and our athletes who are very motivated, or should be very motivated to take care of some of those smaller details. Everyone comes in and they want to train and they want to get faster, they want to get stronger, they want to build on their skills, all that good stuff. But it's really the detail work that often gets overlooked. It's the nutrition, it's dehydration, it's the sleep quality, it's all those things and we're only as good as we are managing that side and we really understand and have a lot of athletes that run into some trouble sometimes because they're not taking care of themselves. Their focus is much on either their academics or their sports. They're not taking the time to do what's really necessary for them and prioritize appropriately. At the end of the day, we want to look good, feel good, play good, all all those things. It's amazing to me, like I said, still within our own community where I'm constantly encouraging these young people that water is important and nutrition is important. This is how you go about this and we talk about it all the time, and it's still really is a struggle for all of them to re-prioritize these variables that we're discussing. Sleep and recovery is another one. Kids, again, social media, the last thing that they do before they go to sleep is look at their phone, and they're on their phone maybe for an hour, two hours, three hours, who knows? It could be video games. The kids come in here and they tell me, "I just sat down with my buddy yesterday, played four hours of video games, haha." It's like, "All right. Well, maybe we can minimize a little bit. Maybe we can try something a little different. I'm not going to take it away from you, but let's think about how we can be a little bit healthier and provide more balance overall within our lives." What I'm really hearing is that you're talking about health as part of the whole person and the way that those healthy habits carry forward into life. I want to transition to talking about that the way that young people may be involved in shaping not only their own future selves, but the future of health and health policy, and turn it to Megan because your school has been doing some really interesting work around that. How did you and your school first become involved with LessCancer? How does that participation tie into a larger school programming? Well, thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this panel and to share time with so many other community partners that Highland has had the privilege of working with. We were invited almost a decade ago to join the national cancer prevention event, and we jumped at the chance to involve our students, to have them have the opportunity to witness such a collaborative effort in community problem-solving on a national and even global scale. Then they hear directly from experts in multiple disciplines, and to see how they were working together, and how those individual pieces could fit together to help shape and influence decision-making, both on a personal, community, and national policy level. We were really grateful to be included, and it fit perfectly with Highland's School mission, which is to develop and prepare students to thrive, lead, and serve, both while they're students at school in their personal lives and in their school community and greater community that Highland is a part of, but also beyond when they join new communities at college and future communities as adults. Being a part of the National Cancer Prevention Day program really empowers our students in terms of giving them data and information so that they can make informed decisions about their behaviors and choices. We've seen that in our community partnerships here locally as well. We have really been grateful for the programs that the PATH Foundation has organized, whether it's bringing Chris Herren to speak to students on substance abuse prevention topics or involving our students on student panels to learn about substance abuse prevention topics such as anti-vaping. We had students participate with other area high school students and an information session about that, while our adults were in a different room also getting that great data, and research, and updates. It really empowered our students to come back and start an aware club here at school so they could share that information with their peers and figure out ways to promote health on our campus and beyond. It fits in a lot of different ways as well. We want our students to be problem solvers, as Rob said, and to be curious about their communities, to ask questions. So different programs like our summer service camp, we lean heavily on our community partners to organize service projects, to really open up our kid's eyes to our community beyond what they know. How they experience the community and the world is not how others do, and so helping them understand different perspectives is key. We could not do that without the partnerships that we work with. Whether it's Rob inviting our students to learn about the work of the Free Clinic, inviting them and empowering them to be volunteers and to do their service with him, and then celebrating their contributions to his organization can lead to other great goals for them as they pursue their college studies. Kristen mentioned our service project with her in the summer, and that was based on her willingness to work with youth and understand that the power that youth have to help shape community wellness and meet community objectives. We were really grateful to be a part of that program. As an aside, I'm also a Fauquier County public school parent, and so I'm super grateful to the fresh program as a parent in our family and the impacts that that has had in our own household. Daryl, who is just been so generous with his time and opened up his organization and organized an information session and a tour of the Habitat build site for our fifth grade Lego build team who was working on creating innovative solutions to housing and security as part of their team competition. These community partnerships and collaborations are crucial to our work to develop civic responsibility in our students to help them build both their competence and their confidence as future leaders. That is the perfect way to go into our last session. I mean, that's a wonderful summation of engagement of collaboration and of civic contribution. Up until this point in the panel discussion, we've focused really on people, individuals, and institutions in the town. But of course, the town is more than just the community. It's also a legal entity in its own right, with governance. Led by a town council and a town manager who are charged with setting and implementing policy. Brandie, help us bring this all together. What role does a town government play in the health of the community? I think when we talk about the role the town plays in a healthy community, it's really what we're doing here today, which is defining health an a broad fashion. That it's not just one thing. Someone that I admire once said that a healthy community you should feel like it just happened. But it doesn't, it takes everybody coming together and focusing on that. The town takes that definition of what health is and it includes, like Rob said, our mental health, social, physical, even our economic health as a community. We need to use that health lens when we're looking at the built environment, walkability, access to healthy foods, equity. This plays out like in a farmers market as an example. We have a farmer's market it's not just that one quick check the box, do you have a Farmer's market. But defining that a Farmer's market broadly in its sense, we incorporate kids day with fresh. We also have incorporated snap with help of the PATH Foundation and other partners, really saying, not only do you have that farmer's market, but what does it mean broadly to ensure that access to healthy food and that is where I feel that town's role is ensuring that we broadly define what health is here in Warrenton. I want to stay on that for just a minute. We know that we are living in some extraordinary times when around the time that Farmer's market would normally have been opening this season. It wasn't clear whether we would even be able to gather for something like that. Tell us a little bit about what the town did and the way that it used assets like the Farmer's market, not only to address broad health challenges, but some systemic solutions in unusual clients. Yeah, I think that when we're talking about health in that broad aspect, a farmer's market does serve as such an important social outlet, as well as access to food for everyone. This last year, it's hard to talk about health in any subject right now and not focus on some of what happened last year. But it was clear to us with the farmer's market when the pandemic started to play out, what role it played in our community. Coming together, being outside people just walking to the market in the morning and walking back home, it gave them a place to go. As things started to change, the pivot that we made with the market, we took that market and we said, "Okay, this is really important to everybody. How are we going to keep it going?" At the time there wasn't many opportunities, so we decided to do a drive through market, "Why not? Let's give it a go." It evolved each week, it changed each week. But what was interesting was we still saw a lot of our at-risk families that are using snap and were accessing the food that they needed to, which was so important when we were focusing on our true actual physical health. Then also, it was the only outlet we had in the early days of the pandemic to wave. It was probably through a closed window some of us that were in masks, we were standing in the street, we were a few feet away, but that Farmer's market was also that social outlet. People would wait in line for an hour to just drive through the market and get what they need it. Because it was also that social connection and still being a part of a community. The Farmer's market did really illustrate that broad definition in that lens of overall health for us during that time. In an earlier comment, you mentioned walkability and there's a lot of talk around that term now. For example, [inaudible] talk about walk score to rate neighborhoods. Doctors talk about how, and Chris talked about this, how walking can add years of your life. Why has that becomes so important? What role does Warrenton or does a town or the town governance play in walkability and its relationship to creating the physical environment of a healthy town. Yeah, walkability. For me coming from a background in urban planning is something we've always focused on, and then walk score started getting added to those apps and it became a little bit more of a trendy buzz word. But I think back to what Rob said earlier when he was talking about how the doctor has to address wounds its directly in front of them. I read a report once where a woman had died of a heat stroke, and the doctor was so frustrated because he had to say that she had passed due to that heat stroke, not from lack of transit, lack of trees to keep her in the shade, and overall lack of walk-ability. I think that is really where walk-ability comes into defining a healthy community. That if we don't create a place where people can walk, whether that socioeconomic, overall health, mental health, just that built environment doesn't create a safe place to walk, and you're really not focusing on the overall health of your communities. What Warrenton has done as it relates to what is sometimes now a buzzword with walk-ability is just to set clear defined goals around walk-ability. What does that mean? That means each year on our budget, you have to go through and say, "What have you done to increase overall walk-ability throughout the town?" We had the heel resolution which was passed by the Council, which is clear direction to the staff that everything you're doing should focus on overall health. We have implemented complete streets, and that means that any street we build from here on out should be complete for everyone, not just for cars. We have an $8.2 million road retrofit. This is a lot of money going into retrofitting a road that isn't adding any capacity. That's hard for people to recognize that that is a new change to completely redo a road to make it safer, more walkable, bikeable, and also ADA accessible. Really taking that and incorporating it and traffic calming and everything that we do. When we talk about walkability, it really is looking at all of these different aspects and remembering that some people do need to walk for their basic needs, and if you don't provide them that opportunity, you're going to overall compromise their health. Back to Rob's point on just dealing with the end result versus everything that led up to that moment. What I'm really hearing you talk about is how much health, whether it's individual health as Chris talked about, or community health as you're talking about in terms of governance impede design, how much of that comes down to where you set your priorities, what you focus your attention, your time, your funding, your thought on. We're getting to the end of this session. I want to thank each of you for making this your priority both today and sharing your stories with us, and in always keeping health at the forefront of your thoughts and actions. This has been just a wonderful pleasure to be with you and hear about all of the work that you're doing. I'm so proud and honor delivering in this community and always so re-energized, talking with all of you and remembering the incredible work that you all do to strengthen the health and vitality of this community. Thank you all so much. I did have one thing that I wanted to just add and I think Christine hit on it. If I could just add that in, I think that as much as the town does around creating a healthy community and creating that platform, if everyone isn't showing up and isn't partnering with us, we can't do it. If for me to be successful in creating a healthy community, it really takes everybody else to be my partner, it takes everybody on this call today. To Christine's point on showing up, there's only still much a government can do whether it's investment or anything else. If you don't have those key community partners that also have this same ideas and goals is you whether it's Chris at OTech has a private business and Kristen at Highland school, Fauquier Habitat, the Free Clinic. Everybody comes together and absent that the government can't achieve anything without its partners. I think that is a really important component of the success here in Washington. That's great. Any other last thoughts or second thoughts or anything that you want either in at the end or edited backend to your portions. I know, I was doing an interview with Brandie and I was like and you need to turn the camera back on again because the only thing I wanted to say, I didn't say it. I think there was one more thing that I just wanted to touch on. Again, we're talking about this broad spectrum view, I think you'll all agree with me. Once again, this shift from this reactionary mindset that we have in this country to a more proactive mindset and taking responsibility for our health and helping people understand and how to reprioritize and have that proactive mindset. It's my mission really to try to create as many leaders as possible within our facility, and to try to encourage as many young people as possible to do exactly what we're all doing. Giving them the tools, and making them understand the differences really between that reactionary mindset, and that proactive mindset. Certainly not only going to help them as individuals but really encouraging them to discuss that amongst their peers, and with their families, and all that good stuff. We have to have that major shift, and make that thought process just a little bit different overall. That's going to be vitally important moving forward, where rather than getting to a problem preventing it from starting in the first place. If we take these steps, then hopefully we can stop issues from happening really at all. What's really interesting, and it touches upon Brandie's comment about the town can only do so much, and it relies on other people to pick it up, and do their part. I think the reverse is important to emphasize as well. In this time of political tension, and disagreement that we see nationally, we're fortunate to be living in a community that has a town government that addresses problems without partisanship in many cases. The ability to work collaboratively with the town I think all of us have pointed to that. That's a gift, and again, I'm grateful for that support that the tab warrants has shown us to be able to move forward with the work that we're doing in this community. I agree, and one of the things that jumped out of me when you, and Brandie was talking was the benefit that we have is that we're small. I mean, I can pick up the phone, and I can call Brandie. I can ask a question. You don't get that everywhere. I can say, ''I need help on this, who can you direct me to,'' and she can say, ''Call this person.'' I was thinking back to when we picked our locations for engagement. I don't know, I didn't think of this, but walk-ability was one of the things we thought of. We chose areas that were within walking distance of high poverty areas because we knew that our children wouldn't get there without that access, so I'm thankful for everyone here so thank you. I remember when I first came to this community, I would sometimes hear, ''Well, we're small. It's not like it's a big urban area. We don't have this massive budget. We don't have this, massive infrastructure, and so we can't do it.'' I think what I'm hearing you all say,, and I have certainly found in the decade plus that I've been curious, small is our superpower. I think that especially in a panel like this, it's such a wonderful reminder to outside communities, people listening to this. That rural America, and small-town America has so many lessons to share with the nation, about how that spirit of collaboration can have such extraordinary outcomes, small is our superpower. It's been really nice because one of the things that since joining Fauquier Habitat in coming to this community. In whenever we've had discussions about how to solve problems or pattern move projects forward. I cannot remember a single time where someone's first answer was no. That's really valuable because that encourages all of us to dream audaciously, and think about what we can do to make a difference in the community, and break down barriers until instead of having that first thing being, ''No can't do it,'' says like, ''How can I help you get there? That speaks it to exactly where you're talking about is the nature of the town, Kristen. I could just add to that. I think that spirit is really important for kids first, and model for our students, and to offer to them as well to continue to encourage their creative ideas that are out of the box thinking in their belief in their own ability to impact communities so when the adults collaborate effectively, and you see that I think it's really a great example to show for our kids. I'd like to just say, culture comes from leadership. We have great leadership in this community, this town, where people talk to each other. We have a local government that engages. Nothing's more important than health. Keep having to remember that's important to absolutely every single person. We still have work to do. There's a lot of inequity. The COVID crisis has really just been a magnifying glass, 17 percent of our county is black, and brown, but 54 percent of COVID cases. As long as that inequity is there that's a little tiny poison in the water, and we have to keep after it, and I know everybody here is going to keep holding each other accountable to try, and make the inequities go away. But we're not there yet. I think we're an example of a town that is going the right way, but we have to keep going. Everybody thank you all so much. Thank you for the work that you do, and thanks for spending this time together. I wish that we could all be together. I'm looking forward to when we can have a conversation like this actually around the table together. But thanks for being our virtual table today. I wanted to send our special nice, healthy town Fauquier panel. We are honored to work with all these people who are doing good work in bridging the gap on chronic health issues in a multitude of ways. Less Cancer is fortunate to have an office in Washington, and we are inspired to be working with so many great people doing good things to secure public health. Thank you.
