In the last year, the local conversation about healthcare has focused largely on the availability of facilities. However, research shows that how a person lives — what they consume, where they live, whether they exercise, how much money they make — actually has a greater influence on health outcomes.

A community’s health is also influenced by the gap between the richest and the poorest. Although Lincoln County’s coastal towns are known for their wealthy retirees and summer visitors, many of its citizens struggle to make ends meet.

“Lincoln County’s workers commonly have the lowest or second lowest weekly wage in the state,” Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission’s Mary Ellen Barnes said. “This shows the predominance of low-wage service employment in the major tourism industry.” 

Barnes believes economic disparity is a factor in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s findings that Lincoln County was the 11th healthiest of the 16 Maine counties in 2011.

The Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission recently received a $20,000 grant from the Maine Health Access Foundation to identify one or two priority health issues affecting Lincoln County’s citizens. Their efforts will focus on individuals who may be greatly affected by poor health but not frequently heard.

“One of the cool things from our point of view is this grant provides a way to look at individual stories and put them in the context of their communities,“ Barnes said. “Health is about a lot more than just what services are available, it’s also about things such as whether you can afford healthy foods or whether you have transportation.”

LCRPC will work with Healthy Lincoln County, Coastal Enterprises Institute and a host of other community groups and agencies in what they hope will be a multi-year process that leads to solutions. This year’s effort, which will be completed by October, is the homework phase: reaching out into communities to gather information and define the top priority one or two health issues.

Barnes hopes that this first effort will lead to additional grants to develop solutions to the identified health problems and to implement those solutions.

The grant’s formal kick-off took place in early February, when 30 representatives from local organizations gathered at a church in Damariscotta. Jennifer Gunderman-King and Barnes explained the grant’s goal and then with help from those gathered, began to compile a community network. This network analysis provides a key to local organizations and individuals and will serve as a tool for getting in touch with community members.

The group also decided to focus the grant’s efforts on the elderly, youth and the working poor in Lincoln County.

With this work in hand, Barnes and her co-workers now shift to the individual communities for the data gathering phase of the project.

“We will be meeting people where they work, pray and congregate,” Barnes said, ”We will reach people through focus groups, support groups and church groups. We will be introduce ourselves by being part of an agenda of an existing event or program. We will also do one-on-one interviews.”

Barnes said she see this process more as relationship building than strict data gathering and hopes that those interviewed stay engaged through the entire process.

“Part of the goal is to empower people. We would love it if people would be willing to engage in finding solutions,” Barnes said. “This is not just a touch base and it’s over. We want to keep people involved in the process and develop ongoing relationships with groups and individuals.

“This is about making sure citizens have a voice in health access.”