Sixteenth Street is proud to have received not one, but two Healthy Wisconsin Partnership Program (HWPP) grants. HWPP is a prestigious funding entity that is dedicated to improving health through community partnerships with the academic staff at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Grants, charitable contributions and gifts are part of the patchwork of support that enables us to care for patients and also pilot new projects that can test new models of care or improve the health of the community we serve – the community that is outside of the four walls of our clinic buildings.
One HWPP project is Scaling-Up Milwaukee Urban Agriculture and Nutrition. This program will be run by our Healthy Choices program, and will pilot a multi-generational consumer education system to improve food literacy and foster school-based initiatives and garden development in the two zip codes where most of our patients live on the south side of Milwaukee.
The other HWPP project will be run by our Environmental Health Department’s Lead Poisoning Prevention program. The overall goal of Growing Healthy Soil for Healthy Communities is to build community capacity in two Milwaukee neighborhoods, using urban agriculture programming as a transformational and empowerment tool, to mitigate exposure to lead through primary prevention. The project will demonstrate the effectiveness of soil and landscape interventions, expand environmental health literacy education and provide access to soil testing that creates awareness of environmental policy needed to sustain change.