Category: MAPP in the news

[Posted in the Homer News on 1.7.2016]

By Kyra Wagner

It’s a new year. Did you come up with a list of resolutions or decide to throw them all out and just make it through another day? Here I am writing an article about community health, but I have to tell you, it’s not my job. It’s yours.

The fact is, you cannot have a strong resilient community if all the residents that make up the population are stressed out and at their limit. During the last MAPP assessment 3 years ago we realized that many issues families struggle with are due to being pushed to the limits of time and money, patience and endurance.

So community resilience actually starts with the individual. How can you be more at peace? How can you best design your day so it feeds rather than drains you? A doctor can’t prescribe that, but it’s the best way to be healthy. Imagine if you told your doctor that you didn’t feel well and he said:

“I want you to meditate for 20 minutes twice a day, exercise for at least 30 minutes a day, avoid processed foods, eat plenty of organic fruits and vegetables, spend more time in nature and less indoors, stop worrying about things you cannot control and ditch your TV.  Come back in 3 weeks.”

Taking care of your self is the core of all health.  You cannot effectively take care of someone or something else until you are stable yourself. Like the stewardess tells us, “Put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others.”

This is a really old message.  Why do we hear it all the time yet still ignore it?  Megan Murphy, coordinator of MAPP, recently sent me a quote from a 1946 article that she found at her grandparents’ home while visiting over the holidays. It said, “Natural belief in self makes your life happier.”

How can we achieve that wellbeing? The first step of course is knowing where you are at in the first place.  How much time during your day do you spend in a reactive rather than receptive state? How often do you say no rather than yes? Try saying it out loud. You can feel it in your body, how yes feels and how no feels.

According to Dr. Dan Siegel, “these negative states are based on threat, and our whole system becomes unhealthy.” Reactive negative states come in the form of anxiety, anger, fear, sadness, maybe despair. These drag you down, we all know that. The more time you spend in a reactive state, the more time your body is set for that age-old instinctive fight or flight, flee or faint. That defensiveness is tiring.

How can we instead focus on thriving and flourishing? This is where the receptive state comes in. All the emotions associated with the positive receptive state are the emotions like kindness, compassion, caring, love, empathy, connection, joy and gratitude. Just say those things out loud and pay attention to that little uplift you will feel. The receptive state is simply the gateway to wellness.

Psychologist Shawn Achor calls this the Happiness Advantage. Achor states that, “Your brain in positive performs significantly better than in negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, energy levels rise. In fact, what we found is that every single business outcome improves.  Your brain in positive is 31% more productive than in negative, neutral or stressed.”

Achor also would say that 90% of your long-term happiness can be predicted not by the external world but by how your brain processes the world. Is your happiness tied to some future success? How can you bring happiness and that receptive state to every day?  It may take some exercise.

I’m not talking about exercise like jogging, though some folks may have that as one of their new year’s resolutions. A resolution to take care of yourself, put on your own oxygen mask, actually can be easier than that. Exercising that positive state can also include journaling a positive experience every day, doing a random act of kindness, or noting three things you are grateful for each day.

We have plenty of negative input from the world around us but for our own health we need the positive. Then we can be strong for our friends and family and help them into a state of positivity. Then we can help our coworkers.  Then we can help our community.

So this new year, take care of yourself. Be happy.  The world depends on it.

Kyra Wagner is the coordinator of Sustainable Homer and a member of the MAPP steering committee.

[Posted in Homer News on November 5th, 2015]

By Kyra Wagner

When I recently got in touch with Dave Branding, CEO of South Peninsula Behavioral Health Services (the Center), I was surprised to hear he had watched the sunrise from the harbor. Turns out, Dave loves boats and harbors here in Alaska. Having been here almost four years, I’m guessing that his love of boats and harbors has grown from his appreciation for how they get him closer to fish. Dave is one of the most dedicated fishermen I know.

But running an organization as big as the Center has got to come with some stress, so I am glad that our area can offer Dave the moments for personal connection to what feeds him. Personal self-care is vital for health and resiliency.

When Dave originally moved up the ladder in the behavioral health field, his goal was to work with more than just one person at a time. Now instead of directly working on the emotional well-being of clients, he is more concerned with the well-being of an entire workforce who serve those clients. In these tight economic times statewide, he has mentioned his struggle with the conflict of knowing that staff needs to take time and care of themselves on one hand and while being productive enough to sustain the organization and its services to the community on the other.

This is a common struggle. When do we cross over from enthusiastic encouragement to peer pressure and toxic stress? Can you identify it in your life? Is it at work or at home? If you can identify it when someone does it to you, can you identify it when you do it to someone else? Is it a habit or is it directly tied to how hard the day has been?

This is where self-care is of utmost importance.  How can we be balanced and supportive of others if we aren’t ourselves? This chain reaction of personal health affects our relationships to the people around us, our work environments, our community as a whole. No amount of self-care is too small or insignificant. Every flight attendant will tell you: put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

Knowing what feeds you and prioritizing it in your life is a huge part of that. Only then can you calmly step back and clearly see in others what they need and support them in that. For Dave, going fishing is the way he relaxes and stays centered.

At the Center, everyone is constantly connecting the concept of individual health to community health.  Homer is known state-wide as a caring community. Clients of the Center often receive services at home or learn skills in the community rather than being shuttered up in some facility. Seeing our connection to the bigger picture, to the community at large, is part of that individual health.

Really, it’s all connected. Individual health leads to better interpersonal relationships which creates better workplace and community environments. A more supportive community is also one that feeds the individual and families. It all comes around.

So where is the weakest link in your life? What is most in need of strengthening?

During the last MAPP community health needs assessment, the concept of toxic stress and ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) was identified as a root cause of a huge number of health issues. It is quantifiable. It is not just soft talk about how we should be all warm and fuzzy to ourselves and each other. It is concretely measurable. Toxic stress affects your brain, your body, your relationships.

The good news is that the cycle can be broken. At the Center, Dave was proud to tell me about Parenting with Love and Limits, a new program starting this week focused on supporting families through a combination of education and therapy. This program is evidence-based, meaning that SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) has already proven that it works. Since so much of our emotional wellness is connected to all these other relationships, it is not surprising that a program that includes the whole family instead of just the individual is going to be more effective.

The connections between our individual, family and community health are endless, but easy to forget as we go through our day.  As a gentle reminder, thousands of Homerites will be receiving a packet in the mail with details about connecting on these different levels and what that looks like. Packed with information, images and stories, this packet won’t ask you to donate, join or jump onto any bandwagon.

It simply is asking you to think about the importance of connection.

To yourself.

To others.

To the community.

May we all be healthy.

Kyra Wagner is the coordinator of Sustainable Homer and a member of the MAPP steering committee.

[Posted in Homer News on September 30th, 2015]
by Kyra Wagner

When it comes to creating a healthy, resilient community, there is one term that is even more important than economic capital. It’s social capital. Relationships, connections and networks are what truly give a community strength to withstand anything the outside world can throw at us.

So how do we connect? There is no better way to answer this question than to ask someone who is new to town. So I asked the question to Paige Meadows, the new VISTA volunteer working with MAPP. Paige and I have some things in common, like how I love networking around this community and how his job is to strengthen networking and collaborating around this community.

Then there are aspects where we are at different ends of the spectrum. I have lived here for 15 years and Paige just got here a couple of months ago. I am completely at home in small towns and Paige comes to us from Charlotte, N.C., where there are more people than the whole state of Alaska.

Imagine squishing all Alaskans into 300 square miles instead of 663,300 square miles. And Paige notes other differences from his hometown. The medium income in Charlotte is around $40,000 whereas it is about $70,000 in Alaska. The percent of people in poverty is almost twice as much in Charlotte as here.

We can always find differences. Differences are how we define “us” and “them.” The beautiful thing about connection is that it brings in the color to this black and white world of us and them. Finding similarities we share is part of connection, but accepting differences makes these connections real.

At the community level, my favorite example of this kind of connection was with the Homer Playground Project (HoPP). Karen Hornaday Park transformed in just eight days with all the different people HoPP organized together. People from all walks of life, with different stories and backgrounds, all worked on the shared vision of creating something wonderful for kids. All the differences are what makes our park so unique, but the shared vision is what actually got it built.

Paige didn’t experience that in Charlotte. He says that there you don’t smile at people on the street, you mind your own business. But he also says that they are much better than Homerites at connecting electronically. Since Paige is used to going online to connect, his impression of Homer is that it is not well connected.

Which is funny because I am always trying to think of ways to get Paige to meet more people so he can be more connected. This is partly generational. I’m old school in the way I network. I like meetings and potlucks. Paige got his college degree online in a city where the median age is 33. He is much more used to texting and connecting through Facebook and Craigslist.

However we connect, online or in person, nurturing community-level connection is vital for resilience. Studies have shown that neighbors are often the first on the scene of an accident, not the EMS, so knowing the strengths and skills of your neighborhood can only build up the strength of your own security. That is social capital.

Paige likes that Homer has an abundance of things to do and ways to connect to the community. There are tons of events happening all the time, music and art, and plenty of outdoor activities. What is your story? What do you like to do? How do you connect? Rather than financial capital, the question is how you build your social capital. What do you do to build you social savings account?

Connections aren’t just something that happens on the community level. All of these stories and questions also play out in our personal relationships. How do you strengthen your connections to other individuals in your life? What is your story? Do you prefer to connect quickly online or hang out for hours at the coffee shop? How do you nurture these connections?

But there is another level of connection as well. All connections start with the individual, from a base of connection to self. What is your story? What do you like to do? How do you give time to yourself? What is your form of self-care?

Imagine if everyone in the community was working to support all these connections at all of these levels. Wouldn’t that be a much better discussion to have buzzing online and in those coffee shops than the latest Hollywood or Capitol Hill gossip?

Working together to make a more resilient and connected community takes all of us participating. Join in that community conversation. Building social capital is not as tangible as building financial capital, but it is just as important. And it is easy to share, no matter your story.

Kyra Wagner is the coordinator of Sustainable Homer and a member of the MAPP steering committee.