Recently, an intern working in collaboration with WCCI, Brittney Craven, sat down (virtually) with McKenzie Hellman, a Health Promotion Program Manager at AppHealthCare. She spoke with us on the importance of having resilience skills and tools in our toolboxes, building resilience on the community level, and more.
Brittney: Would you mind introducing yourself and explain your various roles in the community?
McKenzie: I am McKenzie Hellman and I am one of the Health Promotion Program Managers at AppHealthCare. AppHealthCare is the district health department and covers Watauga, Ashe, and Allegheny counties. Within that role, I do a lot of different community work. I help build local coalitions, look at the root causes of health and how we can best impact our communities, and build capacity around particular health topics. My work can be really varied. It can vary from focuses on substance misuse to looking at walkability and access to care. I kind of dabble in a lot of different topics and bring those health topics to the communities we serve.
Brittney: Would you mind sharing with us about your role within the 2021 WCCI conference?
McKenzie: Yeah, I had attended a few WCCI conferences in the past and was super excited to be able to have a session myself, along with my colleague Lindsey Sullivan. We will be sharing a little about this project we call a Resilience Catalyst Site or sometimes we call it Building Community Resilience (BCR). This project is simply going to be sharing that process of being a site to foster resilience in our community. We will share action items and how we can better serve our community with some of the topics that we've chosen and really be intentional about sharing that process and inviting people to be a part of it.
Brittney: It sounds like you offer more of a proactive approach rather than a reactive one. Would you share with us a bit about your background in work with trauma?
McKenzie: Within AppHealthCare and our community health team, I think you said it spot on. We focus a lot on prevention or upstream approaches and so when our team members and I were introduced to the topic of ACEs, that fit in really well with the health impacts that we were trying to make at the health department. We really looked at that high level of prevention so that there are not these effects later down the line. This fit really nicely into a lot of the work we try to incorporate in our programs within the health department, not just in my role.
Brittney: Did you have an interest in trauma work before entering into AppHealthCare?
McKenzie: So I had first learned about Adverse Childhood Experiences(ACEs) in my time at App State. I am a graduate of the public health program there and the first time I went to a WCCI conference, the second year they ever had one at Mt Vernon, I ended up going as part of my internship. That's where I was really informed. I had learned a little bit about ACEs in the classroom setting and then that conference sparked that interest in me even more. After I graduated, I was lucky enough to be hired at the health department and got involved in WCCI right when I started. It was really a perfect fit and exciting that so much great work was going on in our community.
Brittney: What is your favorite aspect of trauma work or resilience work?
McKenzie: I think the idea of resilience that gives me hope is that everybody has resilience in them. It’s learning tools and things that work for different people and how to foster that the best way. It’s thinking through resilience on a community level, having systems in place, supports in place that allows a community to be more resilient. That’s what really makes me come alive, just thinking about how our community could be a more thriving place with those supports and different things to allow individuals, residents, and community members to be as resilient as possible collectively not just individually.
Brittney: You touched on some of the tools to build resilience but what else do you want others to know about trauma, trauma work, or resilience?
McKenzie: I think when people are first learning about ACEs, one thing that is really important to highlight is that if you've experienced ACEs, that's not your destiny. Adverse Childhood Experiences can lead to particular outcomes but that doesn't mean that's going to be your outcome. I think that's where the topic of resilience is so important to bring in because it can be disheartening when you're first learning about it or first introduced to that topic. It can feel like “oh my goodness. Is this what I have to look forward to? these chronic health conditions or these things that negatively impact my health? is that the destiny I have now?” It’s helpful to be aware of those things but it doesn't necessarily mean that's where you're going to end up. I think it’s helpful to highlight that and then bring in those resilience skills and tools to help offset that pathway.
Brittney: This is kind of going back a bit because we've already spoken a lot about resilience but how do you define resilience? What does resilience mean to you?
McKenzie: I hear it described as kind of this bounce-back factor but I think it's a bit more than that. I think it's having positive coping skills for life’s many stressors and that looks different for a lot of people. I think it’s also having grace under pressure.
Brittney: Will you share with us more regarding your resilience work or what interventions you’ve implemented?
McKenzie: We're not quite at a phase where we're implementing. There's a lot of strategic planning in place and we were selected in 2019 so a lot of our processes thus far have been selecting topic areas and things we want to focus on. We were able to select those after this past summer. We had different ways to gather community voices and learn from residents and stakeholders in the area to hear what the needs are in this community. We didn't want to just pick a topic and roll with it. We wanted to hear what people had to say in their lived experience. We were able to conduct stakeholder interviews and community visioning sessions and all types of data gathering to really try and understand a picture of Watauga County. Through that process, we were able to dive into that data and hear what people had to say. We picked two focus areas for our site specifically and they are looking at employment in Watauga County and then also looking at housing. Those were things that we saw highlighted again and again during those interviews or sessions. So those are the two focus areas that we honed in on. Once we had those we jumped into some logic model development and really trying to be strategic with having our inputs and outputs and deliverables and knowing where the project is going. Being at the public health department we are the responding agency for the pandemic so we didn't have a ton of capacity to focus on this project within the past year but we're still able to do meaningful work. I think now we are finally at a place where we are beginning to think through implementation so not quite at that phase yet but getting there.
Brittney: I know one of the topics that's kind of swirling around right now is the trauma that's going to come about in the healthcare field because of COVID. Do you have any suggestions or responses for us to support the healthcare community?
McKenzie: I think in the helping professions, specifically health care, during this time there's a level of burnout that maybe hasn't been experienced as intensely as it has prior. I think the idea of resilience and tools to have in your toolbox to kind of reset is super helpful. It's interesting to think through this pandemic in the span of a year. That's a substantial amount of time where it's been a lot of work and pressure on people. Burnout is really real and the need for resilience and having those tools is so needed
Brittney: What are some of the resiliency skills that you use personally to keep yourself well?
McKenzie: That's also a great question. I have done fairly poorly the past year implementing those things. I think one thing that is super helpful for me is being outside moving my body. That physical movement allows me to have more of a clear headspace and brings a refreshing kind of moment for me. I try and get outside when I can but the winter has made that really tricky. I'm thankful for the spring. Also, deep breathing. If I'm feeling that I'm stressed throughout the day taking a few deep breaths to have that rapid reset is super helpful.
Brittney: Wonderful. How can we learn more or get more engaged in the work that you do?
McKenzie: We are doing our presentation at WCCI if anyone's interested in the work that we're doing. We are one of four public health departments that were selected nationally in 2019 to do this resilience catalyst work and look through what makes a community resilient and what kind of things we can focus on to allow our community to be more resilient. We're really excited that we had the opportunity to do that. We partnered with George Washington University, NACCHO, APHA, and CDC to be a part of this project. I would invite people to come to this session if they're interested or like always, feel free to reach out to myself, Lindsay Sullivan, or Hannah Parkhurst at the Health Department. We are all about collaboration and making sure that people are involved or know what's going on. So feel free to reach out and I also extend the invitation to come to the conference.
Brittney: Do you have a website so we could learn more?
McKenzie: It's not a specific AppHealthcare Website but it talks about building community resilience and the projects that we are a part of. https://publichealth.gwu.edu/d...esilient-communities
Brittney: Is there anything that you would like to cover that I didn't ask about or anything additional you want to share?
McKenzie: I am really excited about this project and sharing more in the community. I hope that people get excited about it too. I feel like we're at a place in the health department where we have a little bit more capacity now that vaccine rollout has really broadened. I know our whole team is getting super excited to go back to some community work that we've missed this past year.
Brittney: We are excited to hear about all the amazing work you and AppHealthCare are doing. Thank you for meeting with me and sharing with us about your project.
Special thanks to McKenzie Hellman and AppHealthCare, for the work you and your agency do in promoting resilience in our community. Join us on April 21st and 22nd at the 2021 WCCI Virtual Conference: "Community is the Solution!" to hear more from McKenzie and her team on their Resilience Catalyst Site project.
Registration for the Conference can be found at https://www.wataugacci.org/2021-conference.html
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