The Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley has at the core of its mission to improve the quality of life for residents of the Valley, and 2016 was a year of growth in that mission with a focus on creating a healthy community for all.

 

We began the year investigating the factors behind the region's health outcomes, identifying their improvement as an essential aspect of our intended impact. We began brainstorming the best way to address those poor outcomes and talking about how we could engage the community in determining what a healthy Mahoning Valley looks like.
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With a high-need population,

coming up with creative and effective programming to address school readiness is essential for the LaBrae School District. Bouncing into Bascom was one innovative solution they were able to put into action.
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Royal S. Smith is a young man in whom the First Place Community Fund is proud to invest. From the Warren area, Smith fell in love with the University of Dayton's atmosphere on his first campus visit, but with a single mother supporting him and another sibling enrolled in college, he stressed about how feasible his dream of attending would be.

Receiving support from his hometown community helped ease that stress, when Smith was selected as the 2016 First Place Community Fund Scholar. Provided through the Fund's work with The Ohio Foundation of Independent Colleges, this scholarship allowed him to redirect his energy from worrying about how he would pay for his degree in sports medicine to accomplishing that dream.  
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Hospice of the Valley (HOTV) began offering a Medicare Care Choices Model program in January 2016. One of only 141 hospices in the country to implement this program, the model allows patients, who are eligible but who do not elect their hospice benefit, to instead continue curative therapies while receiving medical interventions and support typically provided through hospice care. 
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