OUR HISTORY

Healthy Communities Coalition was created in 1995 by a group of concerned citizens whose desire was to keep our kids safe from drugs, alcohol, and tobacco, as well as to give a growing population the foundation for developing a community desired by all.

Over the last 28 years, HCC has brought to the forefront the reality of poverty, substance use, and mental health and has become more than a basic prevention coalition. HCC supports many aspects of building healthy, thriving communities, from general neighborhood strategies to helping our individual communities become healthier by increasing access to health care, including mental health services.

Our goal is to produce community plans where citizens join with many organizations and sectors to strategize ways to get people out of addiction–not just to ease the symptoms. This is also why HCC adopted a wellness model. Below, you will see how SAMHSA's national prevention initiatives fit our local wellness model. In the plan, one will see how we have locally translated these initiatives to help promote thriving communities.

ABOUT HEALTHY COMMUNITIES COALITION

The Healthy Communities Coalition of Lyon and Storey Counties is a grassroots partnership whose vision is to mobilize, share, and collaborate for healthy communities where all have opportunities to grow, live, and learn. Our mission is to strive to promote and support sustainable, culturally inclusive prevention services, community initiatives, and capacity-building systems that address all factions of a healthy community for all members.

When do we meet? The Coalition typically hosts public meetings on the 2nd Thursday of each month at 9 am, usually at the Silver Springs Community Center. However, there is no meeting of the Coalition in July.

Where are we?
Lyon and Storey Counties are located in rural Nevada's western area. Healthy Communities’ central offices are in Dayton, at 209 Dayton Valley Road. The central office phone number is (775) 246-7550.

Service Area
Most Lyon, Storey, and Mineral communities are located in remote areas of each county, distanced from centralized services and without access to the more typical resources of larger cities, such as public transportation, food and clothing retail outlets, recreational programming, health and social services, and mental health services by as much as 70 miles in some areas. Some of the larger communities include Fernley, Yerington, Silver Springs, Dayton, Hawthorne, and Virginia City. Still, the region also includes many other smaller but distinct and unique communities such as Silver City, Mound House, Smith, Mark Twain, Lockwood, Stagecoach, Gold Hill, Wellington, Schurz, Luning, Mina, Walker Lake, Aurora, Walker River Paiute Tribe and Yerington Paiute Tribe, etc. Dayton and Fernley are our most significant population areas and represent 65% of the population. Due to the distance between the communities (often no less than 40 miles), one program cannot encompass all population centers without duplicating staff or other resources for each area.

How? The Healthy Communities Coalition strives to include a diverse population over an enormous geographic region. Thus, we have multiple ways for our communities to become involved, including coalition membership, community task force membership, youth prevention teams (Stand Tall), and board membership. All of our meetings are open to all; anyone can become a member by filling out a simple application and attending meetings.

Our coalition membership focuses on federal, state, and local agencies, service providers, and community members who work in strategy teams such as youth substance abuse prevention and leadership/job training, senior issues, access to affordable, locally grown food, and access to essential healthcare services and behavioral health care, etc. Needs are addressed as they surface in our communities. Our strategy teams lead the coalition members and task forces to help meet those needs through effective collaboration.

We also maintain youth leadership Stand Tall teams in high schools and middle schools in Dayton, Silver Springs, Fernley, and Yerington. Our youth teams lead their peers in many wellness strategies and help guide the coalition in planning for youth services. Learn more about our activities through our Comprehensive Community Prevention Plan (CCPP).

Our Board of Directors governs and leads our coalition. They are the “glue” that helps keep the alliance together and maintain our vision and mission. Please visit our Board of Directors page for more information.

SAMHSA Prevention Initiatives

  • EMOTIONAL WELLNESS

    Trauma and Justice

    Address the negative effects of violence and trauma by incorporating trauma-informed care in health systems. This includes redirecting individuals with substance use and mental health issues away from the criminal justice system and into supportive treatment.

  • ENVIRONMENTAL WELLNESS

    Housing and Homelessness

    Goal: Ensure access to housing and remove obstacles to effective programs that support recovery for individuals with mental health and substance use disorders who are experiencing homelessness.

  • INTELLECTUAL WELLNESS

    Intellectual Wellness

    Goal: Develop a unified data strategy that guides policy, assesses program effectiveness, and enhances the quality of services and outcomes for individuals, families, and communities.

  • PUBLIC AWARENESS & SUPPORT

    Public Awareness and Support

    Enhance public understanding of mental health and substance use services to promote prevention and access to care. Efforts should focus on reducing stigma and treating these issues with the same urgency as other health conditions.

  • OCCUPATIONAL WELLNESS

    Importance

    While not part of the national model, we believe that occupational wellness is crucial for the overall well-being of our communities and individuals.

  • PHYSICAL WELLNESS

    Health Care Reform

    Expand health coverage to ensure everyone can access high-quality care, particularly for substance abuse, mental health issues, and other medical conditions, reducing existing disparities.

    Health Information Technology (HIT)

    Ensure that behavioral health providers, including prevention specialists and consumer providers, are fully integrated into the general health care system's use of HIT.

  • SOCIAL WELLNESS

    Prevention Prepared Communities

    where individuals, families, schools, faith-based organizations, workplaces, and communities take action to promote emotional health and reduce the likelihood of mental illness, substance abuse including tobacco, and suicide. This initiative will include a focus on the Nation’s youth, Tribal communities, and military families.

  • MILITARY FAMILY SUPPORT

    Military Families

    Support America’s service members—Active Duty, National Guard, Reserve, and Veterans—along with their families and communities by improving access to necessary behavioral health services and ensuring positive outcomes.

  • SENSE OF PURPOSE

    Sense of Purpose and/or Spiritual Wellness

    This is not part of the national model, but we felt it is very important to the overall wellness of our communities and people.

The Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF)

Healthy Communities Coalition has structured our 2022-2024 Comprehensive Community Prevention Plan according to (SAMHSA) Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF). The five steps comprise the SPF, which enables coalitions to build the infrastructure necessary for effective and sustainable prevention. Each step contains vital milestones and products essential to the process's validity. The SPF is conceived of in systemic terms and reflects a public health, community-based approach to delivering effective prevention.

Our SPF process is inclusive of culturally competent strategies to the best of our abilities. We realize cultural competence is an ongoing process and will continue to train staff and coalition partners. HCC feels strongly that people who use the services, including youth, people in recovery, people with financial challenges, etc., should also be part of the entire SPF process

  • Step #1: Assessment

    Profile population needs, resources, and readiness to address needs and gaps. HCC mobilizes key stakeholders, including culturally competent groups to collect the needed data to define problems within our geographic area. We ensure that our key stakeholders understand the roll of culture, race, ethnicity and gender as they relate to our assessment strategies. HCC also completes an assessment of readiness and leadership to implement policies, programs, and practices. See the assessment in our Community Prevention Plan for detailed needs and our implementation plan following for a synopsis of need and gaps.

  • Step #2: Capacity

    Mobilize and/or build capacity to address needs HCC mobilizes resources within Lyon, Storey, and Mineral counties to convene key stakeholders, and service providers to plan and implement sustainable prevention efforts in Steps 3-4 of the SPF. The mobilization of resources includes both financial and organizational resources as well as the creation of partnerships. See our Capacity section in the Community Prevention Plan for details and our coalition partnership list of active participants. We have increased recruiting human resources that ensures cultural representation for our Hispanic population.

  • Step #3: Planning

    Develop a Comprehensive Strategic Plan HCC developed a strategic plan that includes policies, programs, and practices that created a logical, data-driven plan to address the problems we identified in Step 1 of the SPF. We also identified programs and adaptations (such as translating to Spanish) to be inclusive of our region?s Hispanic, Native American and LGBTQ populations. The planning process produced strategic goals, objectives, and performance targets as well as logic models and action plans. See our Planning section in the Community Prevention Plan for details and our logic models included in this narrative.

  • Step #4: Implementation

    Implement evidence-based prevention programs, policies, and practices. HCC has been implementing and planning concurrently now for more than 13 years, and we have taken action guided by our Strategic Plan created in Step 3 of the SPF. We have completed action plans, and selected specific policies, programs, and practices that best fit our needs and capacity. Please see our implementation section of our Community Prevention Plan.

  • Step #5: Evaluation

    Monitor, evaluate, sustain, and improve or replace those that fail We have evaluated the impact of the SPF and the implemented programs, policies, and practices through our partnership with SAPTA via PIRE. We would like to partner with SAPTA to ensure our data collection methods are culturally responsive and appropriate. HCC has also completed satisfaction surveys, community norm surveys, collected trend data, and conducted key stakeholder interviews to see how we have been doing over the years. Our evaluations lead us to expand collaborative work across sectors under our Health and Wellness Hub. As a result, we are seeing better outcomes.