Good News #1

As our readers know, we received an Emmy Award nomination a few weeks ago for our documentary “The Road to 100% Chaves,” highlighting the work of our 100% New Mexico initiative. Next month we will find out if we won the 47th Rocky Mountain Emmy in the category of “Social Concerns.” It was nice to get the public recognition of our work focused on ensuring that each county can ensure vital services to all their families. The documentary highlighted a model for the Family Resource Center: One Stop Service Hub (FRC) that the Roswell-based CASA Kids organization has developed. Since the nomination, interest in our initiative and our FRC model has increased.

Good News #2

Just last week, we heard that our proposal to the MacArthur Foundation for their “100 and Change” award has made it through the first round of reviews and is heading to the second round for a peer review. If awarded, we would receive $100 million in $20 million increments each year for five years. This is our second time applying and last time, five years ago, we made it through the first two phases of review. Will the third time be the charm? If so, our 100% New Mexico initiative will have the capacity to fund ten counties to develop pilot projects for FRCs. We would also have the ability to support the other 23 counties in growing their capacity to develop community-based and school-based one-stop service hubs.

Since we launched the 100% New Mexico initiative half a decade ago, we have been advocating for FRCs, which are vital community hubs that go beyond merely linking families to existing services. These proposed centers, which can be considered one-stop service hubs, are designed to be dynamic catalysts for community development, employing dedicated staff who utilize quality improvement strategies to enhance and expand a county’s service delivery. By addressing workforce shortages in healthcare, education, and social services, FRCs aim to create a comprehensive support system that allows families to thrive. 

The Groundbreaking Goal

Our unwavering goal, with or without the funding from the MacArthur Foundation, is to operationalize the delivery of vital services to families, a process we in public health call “operationalizing the social determinants of health.” This tongue-twisting phrase means, quite simply, that we create through sustainable state funding and local funding, the infrastructure to create FRCs that link all families to existing services and grow services in each county to meet the needs of our children, students, and families. If we are not awarded the 20 million yearly budget for five years from the foundation, we happily have an alternative funding source.

The “1% for 100%” Funding Model

New Mexico does not need to wait for a foundation or even the federal government to launch our bold strategy, though any support would be most welcome. In our book 100% Community: Ensuring 10 vital services for surviving and thriving, we advocated for our “1% for 100%” funding model in which state, county and city government all committed 1% of their yearly operating budget to transforming adverse social determinants of health (lack of services) to the positive determinants. Think of “positive determinants” as services, such as health care and housing, that determine the quality of our lives. As all we all know, our state operating budget is $10 billion, with 1% equally $100 million. Coincidence? The very amount we seek from the MacAuthor Foundation in a global competition is the same amount we could use today, if 1% of our state budget is earmarked for ensuring vital services for surviving and thriving. The return on investment is a drastic decrease in our most costly public health, safety, and education challenges and an end to the epidemic of childhood adverse childhood experiences and trauma.

Good News #3: A Vision Forward

As we sit strategizing about funding for FRCs that can become one-stop service hubs and quality improvement centers that grow services and workforces to staff them, we look for signs of positivity and support. When the universe brought us the Emmy nomination, that was a sign that our mission matters. When we made it through the first level of proposal review by the MacArthur Foundation for the $100 million award, that was another sign that our framework for change and strategy was sound. 

Amid our often chaotic and divisive national dialogue, bold solutions often fail to appear. Yet in New Mexico, the vision of 100% of our families thriving is strong, and more support appears every day. As researchers, we understand that change takes time, even the idea of a one-stop service hub might require years of lobbying until it’s finally fully realized. We hope for more good news. We could win the Emmy, be the recipient of the MacAuthor Foundation award and, most importantly, New Mexico’s leaders invest 1% in the groundbreaking mission of 100% New Mexico. Anything is possible and we believe that good news comes in threes.