Winchester Heights community members, Construction Project Manager, SEAHEC Director & visiting students
On January 18, SEAHEC, Winchester Heights community members and partners, held a groundbreaking for the new community center, scheduled for construction this year. The community center will serve as a hub for local education, health-related activities and community development. With a history of health education and health professions student placement in the Winchester Heights community, “SEAHEC and residents have dreamed of the day that residents would have a place to meet and a safe place for children to play. With the groundbreaking, this dream is now becoming a reality”, said Gail Emrick, Executive Director of SEAHEC.
In 2017, SEAHEC was awarded a Community Innovation grant through the Legacy Foundation of Southeast Arizona, to construct a community center in Winchester Heights, Cochise County. In this unincorporated, isolated rural community, the children of Winchester Heights have no safe place to play and community members have no location to meet, plan or receive health education. This grant creates the opportunity to work with local community members to improve local infrastructure and quality of life.
Close to a million people live in communities along the US/ Mexico border that lack basic infrastructure to support basic public health and safety. These communities, known as colonias, are characterized by their proximity to the border, rural isolation and lack of resources and organizational capacity to support development of decent housing, paved roads, potable drinking water, and neighborhood safety. SEAHEC’s Healthy Farms Program is an innovative community health worker driven initiative that can serve as a model for improving rural infrastructure, while building the local health care work force.
Please join our efforts and Help Support the Winchester Heights Burris Children’s Memorial Park
SEAHEC Intern, Michelle Burris is a Marketing student. She has developed a GoFundMe page for our playground efforts in Winchester Heights, in honor of her brother Jake and sister Jessica who both died of heart problems at a young age. Please check out our page and make a contribution on GoFundMe, or directly to SEAHEC by mailing a check made out to SEAHEC, Inc. at 1171 W. Target Range Rd., Nogales, Arizona 85621.
One hundred percent of funds go to purchase playground equipment for the Winchester Heights farmworker community and the “Burris Children’s Memorial Park.” You can contribute by visiting our campaign here: https://www.gofundme.com/we-heart-children-burris-park
Partners on this project include:
- Arizona Community Foundation of Cochise (ACFC)
- Chiricahua Community Health Centers, Inc.(CCHCI)
- Cochise County Board of Supervisors
- Cochise Health & Social Services (CHSS)
- Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona
- Legacy Foundation of Southeast Arizona
- Project PPEP
- Southeastern Arizona Community Action Program, Inc. (SEACAP)
- University of Arizona, College of Public Health.
- The Vitalyst Health Foundation