Page 35 - BusinessWest October 27, 2021

Initiatives, and in 2015 she became executive director. She described the assignment as one that also fit her groove and gave her an opportunity to be a part of broad efforts that would change lives on many levels.
One of her first initiatives was to work with others to form the Live Well Springfield Coalition, which has been successful in increasing access to healthy eating and physical activity for residents and implementing a number of strategic initiatives, including the Go Fresh Mobile Market.
When asked about PHIWM, its mission, and how the agency carries it out, Collins said that,
in essence, it watches, listens, identifies issues to be addressed, builds coalition to address them, creates action plans (with the actions varying from case to case), and, eventually, hands the issue off another group to handle and moves on to the next challenge — or challenges, to be more precise.
“We take on issues where we have heard from the community that there needs to be attention paid to that particular health issue,” she explained. “We look at the health issue both from stories
we hear from people in the community as well as hard, quantitative data, and then we build a team.
“We invite people to the table with whatever strengths and value they’re going to add, and
we lead the process,” she went on. “Sometimes there’s policy outcomes, sometimes there’s programmatic outcomes, and sometimes ... there’s all of it. And we hold it close until there’s another group that’s poised to take it over.”
As an example, she cited the GoFresh Mobile Market, which was recently handed over to Wellspring Cooperative, a Springfield-based nonprofit that boasts Wellspring Harvest, a commercial hydroponic greenhouse in Indian
Orchard that brings healthy, locally grown produce to area hospitals, schools, and residents.
“That’s just one example of how we incubate, and it’s another opportunity for another organization to take it on, build their mission out, and bring in new funding for themselves,” she said, adding that this has been the pattern followed with several public-health matters, including oral health, asthma, and transportation for patients who need it to get to appointments.
DASHH is another example, she said, adding that the PHIWM incubated the large and persistent problem of asthma and essentially handed off
the healthy-homes initiative to the CDC, which
can take action to address the matter on a much higher plane.
“It went from basically health education and showing up with a flyer to Colleen’s agency showing up remediating homes,” Collins said, adding that this work eventually led to a broadening of that specific mission to air quality, climate change, and the creation of a new coalition called Social Justice for Climate Change.
And that’s just one example of how interconnected the problems concerning public health are and how difficult it is to generate meaningful change.
“Public health and community health are never cut and dry — there’s not just one solution that’s going to help people lead balanced lives,” she explained. “It’s far more complicated than that, and that’s why we appreciate that this work takes decades, and we’re here to stay with it and to test different programs. It’s slow going.”
History Lessons
The next challenge for the PHIWM and Collins
will be youth mental health, an issue essentially chosen by the city of Springfield even before the pandemic, which has only added more layers to an already complicated problem.
“We’ve been working on it for a year, and we’re in the phase of building our team and identifying strategies that we want to test in order to support families and kids around anxiety, depression, and suicidality,” she said, adding that still another priority for her agency, being addressed in partnership with the state Department of Public Health, is trying to understand how to “build capacity around the conversation of racial equity in this region,” as she put it.
“When you control for lots of different things when you’re doing data analysis around health indicators, it is clear that the color of people’s skin is still a top indicator for health,” she said. “And bringing health indicators to a level playing field will not be done until we can truly address one of the most significant root causes, which is racism in this country — so we’re working with a lot of different people to try to figure it out.”
That last comment effectively sums up what has become Collins’ life work and her significance to this region. Since arriving here, she has worked with countless individuals and groups to ‘figure it out.’
She is an administrator and advocate for those in need, but mostly she is a builder — of powerful collaborations that are changing the landscape when it comes to public health. It’s happening slowly, as she said, but it’s happening.
And that’s what makes her a Woman of Impact. n George O’Brien can be reached at
[email protected]
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