Accessible Healthcare…
Love City has Four Pillars: Quality Education, Economic Sustainability, Affordable Housing, and Accessible Healthcare. These pillars are the four things that Shawn and Inga identified in healthy neighborhoods. Every program that Love City has must fall into one or more of these categories. Porkland creates economic sustainability for the school as well as provides jobs and offers healthier food options in the neighborhood. Our rental properties provide affordable housing to our neighbors as well as help drive sustainability. And obviously Mighty Oak provides quality education for students in the neighborhood. Something that not everybody gets a chance to see as much of is our belief in providing accessible healthcare.
When you or someone in your family gets hurt or sick what is the first step? Get a visit to the doctor’s office scheduled, call a family member or friend who is a nurse or doctor for advice, in extreme cases maybe get in the car and go to the Immediate Care or the Emergency Room? That is what the process looked like for me growing up. It is one of the processes that I can say I used to think was universal. However, for a lot of the families in our neighborhood, that is not the case. Most of our families do not have a Primary Care Doctor, a head cold is solved with an ER trip. For some of our families who don’t have cars, that first call is for an ambulance. The cost of this approach is not felt as a majority of our families are on Medicaid or Medicare. For many families healthcare is solely a reactive endeavor, there aren’t preventative measures being sought. This creates a cycle that just burdens our healthcare system. While we don’t have a full solution for this problem yet, and may never have a perfect solution, there are a lot of things we currently do to try and break that cycle and create healthier families in our community.
One of the first things Love City began in our attempt to help create an all around healthier community was in food choices. Our green houses allowed us to grow fresh fruits and vegetables to be able to sell to our neighbors. Part of the reason for opening Porkland was to provide healthier alternatives to the fast food that is found throughout our community. This theme of healthier food options continued when Mighty Oak was opened. Students are not allowed to bring their own lunches so that we can offer them healthier options. Mighty Oak has offered us more great opportunities to provide our families with more healthcare options.
Mighty Oak Students practicing Chest Compressions at the American Heart Association Assembly.
At Mighty Oak we have been able to offer various services to our families through partnerships with other organizations over the years. We have been able to offer Physical Education classes through a partnership with Bellarmine. We get to offer an in school dental service every year with Big Smiles. We get to provide our students with speech therapy through Heuser Hearing, and counseling services through Louisville Mental Health. For the first time this year, we were able to have the American Heart Association in to teach about heart health. Each of these services helps provide some healthcare value to our families, and we hope that what we will be able to offer will continue to grow in the future. Accessible Healthcare is important, and every neighborhood deserves that access.
Ethan
Field Trips!
As the weather gets warmer we are excitedly planning learning activities outside the classroom! Our educators have lined up some amazing opportunities but we need your help to make it happen! Our goal is to visit Payton Glass Creative Center and the Louisville Zoo in the next couple of months before school lets out for the summer. If you are interested in helping support our school's field trips, please click the link below to contribute to the field trip fund!
Fish Fry!
We are back after Spring Break!! We would love to see you. As we seek Rezoning to be able to reopen Porkland six days a week, we have multiple ways that you can support the effort when you come in. Hope to see you soon!!!
If you are interested in volunteering or to find out more information about supplies needed please email: info@lovecityinc.org or call (502) 272-078.