2023 Grantees

Fort Wayne Medical Society Alliance
“NARCAN Individual Pouches Community Harm Reduction” The Fort Wayne Medical Society Alliance, in an effort to combat both fatal and non-fatal drug overdoses in Allen County, Indiana, partnered with the FW Police Department Narcotics Division to identify hot spots that needed Narcan boxes. The Alliance installs, monitors, and restocks 9 NARCAN boxes every week, which include 10-12 kits. These free kits contain a nasal Narcan dose, fentanyl testing strips, and information to get drug addiction help. Their alliance was also able to install the first and only NARCAN vending machine in their county.

Alliance with Nevada State Medical Association
As the final part of a two-year, six-part program, 45 members of the Alliance with the Nevada State Medical Society Alliance and other community members will attend Adult First Aid/CPR/AED certification as our final program. Participants will learn how to act calmly, quickly, and properly in an emergency until medical first responders arrive. After the on-field collapse of a professional football player, this program is more timely than ever.

Nueces County Medical Society Alliance
This program at TG Allen Elementary, a Title I school in Corpus Christi, TX, strives to promote literacy and to make reading a fun skill for these students. Gifting the students with
1-2 books of their own will allow them to read outside of the school building. This program also plans to meet the basic hygiene needs these students may have. NCMS Alliance will create hygiene kits three times throughout the year, and they will be given to students with the greatest need.

Healthy Schools Oklahoma
Healthy Schools Oklahoma (HSOK), a community-based nonprofit organization, has been recognized as a best-practice school health model for the state of Oklahoma. HSOK was developed in 1997 by the Oklahoma County Medical Society (OCMS) to promote and maintain healthy lifestyle choices among children, families, and school faculty. The overall organizational goals are: 1) To build and maintain program infrastructure through extensive community collaborations; 2) To provide training, resources, and support to schools; and 3) To evaluate and disseminate results. Grant funding will be used to expand to more schools in Oklahoma.

2022 Grantees

Nevada Physician Wellness Coalition
The Nevada Physician Wellness Coalition was founded by physicians for physicians in response to a suicide by one of their colleagues. One of the most successful ways that we have been able to reach physicians is through our Statewide Speaker Series. The purpose of the speaker series is to serve more physicians, utilizing evidence-based interventions to decrease burnout, mental health conditions, substance abuse, and suicide, and to increase resiliency and retention.

Dauphin County (PA) Medical Society Alliance
Food insecurity is a lack of consistent access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle. It is a complex problem, and for many, they do not have the basic tools and education to be successful. This grant application addresses this concern. Beacon Clinic for Hope and Health (BCHH) is a free clinic in Harrisburg, PA, and currently, with the partnership of Penn State College of Medicine (PSCOM), operates a pop-up food pantry for their patients. The project will offer healthy recipes, ingredients, and cooking tools to high-risk, underserved patients; provide education and resources necessary to promote success and behavioral change; and partner with Beacon Clinic for Health and Hope, Penn State College of Medicine, and Central PA Food Bank to accomplish the objectives.

Michigan State Medical Society Alliance
The MSMS Alliance will hold the fourth Fall Focus in September 2022. This event is not a fundraiser but is rather an educational opportunity for our Alliance members and the community to learn about an important topic that impacts the health and well-being of our state. This year, the Fall Focus will raise awareness about mental health in school-aged children, to offer an informative program that highlights an important health-related issue for our state. Our next program will focus on the health status of our Michigan children in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Oxford High School shooting. The program will offer tools to help Alliance members, teachers, school counselors, administrators, and board members, as well as interested parents and community members, recognize signs in children who may be struggling with depression, suicidal thoughts, or thoughts of harming others. The Be Nice program brings emotional and mental health awareness training to schools. Social and emotional learning is effective in preventing violence, suicide, substance abuse, and mental health issues.

Good Samaritan Clinic (FL)
The Good Samaritan Health Clinic of Pasco, Inc. (GSHC) or "Good Sam" is a volunteer-driven, non-profit organization located in New Port Richey, FL that has been providing quality, non-emergency medical and dental services, including prescriptions, free of charge, to uninsured, limited-income residents of Pasco County since 1990. AHEI funds will be used to ensure safe disposal of unused or expired medications.

Girls Light Our Way (IL)
Girls Light Our Way (GLOW) will use age-appropriate and activity-based learning as a mechanism to teach girls in GLOW about the social determinants of health: “The conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. These circumstances are shaped by the distribution of money, power, and resources at national and local levels. They are mostly responsible for health inequities – the unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within our country.” We will teach how these factors impact a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks. Once taught, we will use digital citizenship as their tool for action, voice, and self-advocacy.

2021 Grantees

Cabarrus Public Health Interest.  Kannapolis, North Carolina: “Virtual Cooking Classes”      
Virtual cooking classes will be provided to improve community health and eliminate health disparities. There will be eight weekly sessions of 45-minute cooking demonstrations with questions and comments to follow, which will be presented to county residents.

*Greenville County Medical Society Alliance.  Greenville, South Carolina: “Creativity Kit for Kids” (Highlighted on our home page)
Kits will be provided to children (ages 6-12) experiencing anxiety. The kits will provide them with a portable set of tools and activities that promote creativity. The kits will encourage creative projects that can be calming and confidence-building. 

Dauphin County Medical Society Alliance.  Harrisburg, PA: “Comprehensive Diabetic Care”
This project aims to reduce chronic illness, disability, and premature death in prediabetic and diabetic patients by providing high-risk, underserved patients with the tools and resources necessary to achieve optimal quality of life. Dauphin County Medical Society Alliance will partner with Beacon Clinic to develop and implement worthwhile education for these patients, focusing on self-management and good health.

Florence County Medical Society Alliance.  Florence, South Carolina: “Commit To Be Fit”
The health fair is an exciting, interactive, one-hour event for school-aged children (8-10) promoting a healthy lifestyle message: eat smart and move more! Children will be challenged to identify the “Commit To Be Fit” program as a lifelong commitment to ongoing choices for a healthy lifestyle.

Brady Faith Center Inc/Brady Farms.  Syracuse, New York: “Healthy Cooking Education for Perinatal Mothers”
Participants will learn the importance of nutrition during pregnancy and simple ways to prepare nutritious foods at home.  They will also learn how to safely prepare vegetables and fruits for children and babies, including safe storage techniques, tricks to modify meals to reduce sugar and salt, how to add nutritious items like vegetables and grains to meals, and how to extend their food dollar.

2020 AHEI Grant Recipients

Elena’s Light, Pediatric Health Program
Elena’s Light is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that strives to empower refugee and immigrant women and children in Connecticut, particularly in the New Haven area. Elena's Light aims to address the challenges that refugee and immigrant women and children face every day in the United States by offering free in-home tutoring focusing on English language education and driver’s license test preparation; in-home maternal and child health education; and local community engagement and immersion activities. The program will conduct 6 health education classes for refugee women and children. At each class, we will collect baseline data, asking mothers how many children they have and how many times in the past 6 months they have brought one to the emergency room, as well as assessing whether or not vaccines and well-child checks are up to date. The instructional portion of that class comprises 1 hour of interactive, discussion-based content on the topics discussed above. We will ask them to observe one class and then work with them to prepare to co-facilitate the same class for a different group of refugee women. By fostering health leaders in the community, we can empower women to help each other achieve health literacy and confidence in taking charge of their children's healthcare. Finally, another primary goal is to increase the cultural competency of new pediatricians by increasing the awareness of our pediatric resident class facilitators of the unique challenges faced by refugee families in accessing health care and achieving health literacy in the US context.

*Girls Light Our Way GLOW GIRLS TRY-ATHLON (Highlighted on our home page)
Girls Light Our Way is training for a Try-athlon to help our girls develop healthy life-long habits and find joy and community in exercise. Our project focuses on providing group training for running, swimming, and biking while building the students’ physical abilities and personal confidence. We are emphasizing the ‘try’ in triathlon because many of our girls have never participated in such activities in an intentional and meaningful way. Throughout this project, we will cultivate healthy understandings of physical fitness, weight management, and self-efficacy because not only will the Try-athlon test the girls’ physical strength, but the training will challenge their mental limitations, expanding what they thought their bodies and minds were capable of before.

The primary objectives are to educate girls on developing life-long healthy habits, instill a liking for exercise in each girl, both individually and in groups, cultivate a sense of community for the girls surrounding healthy and active living, and build self-confidence in each one of our girls.

*Kalamazoo Area Medical Alliance Victim Services Crisis Card Project (Highlighted on our home page)
The Victim Services Crisis Card Project has been one of the primary educational endeavors of the Kalamazoo Area Medical Alliance (KAMA) for over 20 years. As part of our long-standing relationship with the YWCA of Kalamazoo, we print and distribute over 20,000 information cards across Kalamazoo County. The cards are bright orange and are placed in discreet locations for victims and survivors of domestic and/or sexual assault, and/or human trafficking. The information on the cards describes what first steps should be if one requires assistance, local resources across the county for emergency aid, as well as resources for counseling, shelter, and legal services.

The primary objective of these information cards is to direct the victims and survivors to appropriate resources in the community. The main resource suggested is the YWCA, which has a 24-hour shelter and counseling services, as well as a 24-hour on-call nurse who works with the local hospitals. The YWCA of Kalamazoo is the only domestic violence shelter in the entirety of Kalamazoo County, and the only provider in the state of Michigan that delivers comprehensive services to sex and labor trafficking survivors.

Knoxville Academy of Medicine Alliance Expanding Dreamland - Y.A.A. to Knox County Young Adults
Teens are particularly susceptible to drug experimentation and opioid addiction. We would like to increase awareness of the impact of the opioid epidemic and its dangers to Knox County students in middle and high schools by distributing Sam Quinones' new "Young Adult Adaptation" (Y.A.A.) of his book "Dreamland" to all middle and high schools and all public libraries in Knox county, TN. We will also hold an awareness campaign for the 2020-21 school year by conducting a kickoff to school faculty and administration during the in-service teacher days before school starts in August 2020, with book distribution to Knox County public and private schools by holding a "Meet the Author" skype session with Sam Quinones for middle and high school faculty. 16 middle schools with 13,444 students, 16 high schools with 18,068 students, 25 private middle and high schools with 6,872 students, and 20 Knox County Public Libraries. The goal is to encourage the teachers to conduct book studies and discussions of the Quinones book with their classes.

The primary objective is to encourage widespread reading of the book as well as discussion to promote awareness in young adults of the dangers of drug experimentation and opioid addiction.

Missouri State Medical Association Alliance, MSMA Alliance "Stop the Bleed Program"
The 'Stop the Bleed' campaign was initiated by trauma surgeons from the American College of Surgeons who reported that one-third of the children who died at Sandy Hook could have survived if the bystanders had known how to control bleeding and prevent shock until the injured children could be transported.

Using the official American College of Surgeons-approved 'Stop The Bleed' program and with the purchase of demonstration kits, Alliance members already trained will first train other Alliance members in our county alliances in the approved techniques of hemorrhage control. The trained members will then initiate programs in each county's communities to train potential "bystanders" to control life-threatening blood loss in the event of a traumatic accident (intentional or otherwise.) The objective of the 'Stop the Bleed' program nationwide is to train as many members of the general public as possible in the techniques required to stop life-threatening blood loss following man-made emergencies such as road traffic accidents, shootings, and stabbings, as well as natural disasters. It is hoped that bleeding control will become part of every basic first aid program in much the same way that CPR is now understood and taught to all citizens.

Nevada Physician Wellness Coalition, NPWC Physician Wellness Education Forum
NPWC delivers programs that provide outreach, education, and supportive resources to physicians, medical students, and their families to intervene at all stages of burnout and to prevent suicide. Due to the highly sensitive nature of physician burnout and the attached stigma, NPWC serves its purpose by operating independently of regulatory and licensure bodies, as well as where a physician may be employed.

The educational programming offered to our medical community through NPWC & AHEI will address the complex and shrouded topic of physician burnout and will impart skills related to self-care and suicide prevention. The primary objective of the project is to launch an educational program in an open, community-based setting. The project will bring together community partners, such as the school of medicine, organized medicine groups, and their alliances, and other relevant professional associations to promote the program to the target audience. As a result of this forum, attendees will be able to discuss the high rates of burnout and understand the skill sets and resources available for coping. Recognizing the signs of suicidal ideation and learning how to help colleagues who show these signs will also be featured.