By AnnaBelle Boone / The Jambar
For many, safety is an important part of community health in the Mahoning Valley. The Vibrant Valley Health and Equity Project has made it one of its main focuses.
Vibrant Valley is an organization based in Mahoning County, whose mission is to address challenges to health equity.
Vibrant Valley held a public safety-oriented focus group at the Youngstown Public Library on Jan. 17.
Jenna Johnson works for ECO, a Youngstown-based business centered around environmental protection, said she works on a variety of projects related to environmental issues.
“Vibrant Valley has been focused on community safety for the last several years. We’ve done some online and in person, surveying people to get their overall thoughts of what safety means to them,” Johnson said.
Johnson said the group learned what community members wanted in relation to safety, such as neighborhood and street security.
“We wanted to hold this event so that we could hear from people, face-to-face, about what safety looks like for them, what they’re concerned about in their community and what they would like to see,” Johnson said.
Johnson said the topic that frequently came up was safety regarding proper lighting along roads and sidewalks in Youngstown.
“The big thing I heard in my room was lots of people talking about street lights and sidewalks not being present, or if they are there, they’re super overgrown and don’t work well for community members,” Johnson said.
With safety being a broad topic, Johnson said the group’s leaders found a main goal to successfully lead the focus groups.
“The main takeaway that we wanted was ‘What does safety mean to people?’ and it can be a bunch of different things,” Johnson said. “So we sort of intentionally kept it open so that people would share whatever came up for them.”
Vibrant Valley plans to use the research from the focus group to guide its partnership with the Youngstown City Health District and the Mahoning County Public Health Department.
Both organizations have to complete a community health assessment and improvement plan every three years.