Washington County Opportunities Inc. welcomed its award totaling $25,000 in grant funds from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services-sponsored grant programs right in the State of Mississippi.
Dr. Michael Minor, executive director for the Affordable Care Act Navigator presented the awards Thursday at the WCOI Headquarters in Greenville.
WCOI headstart directors for each center were in attendance to receive the funding allocation for their respective locations.
Minor talked about how the funding became available and WCOI executive director, Terry Jones, talked about how the funding would aid in WCOI operations.
“Oakhill Regional Community Development Corporation, we’re headquartered in Hernando and we are the state’s navigator grantee for the Affordable Care Act. We received funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide outreach, education and enrollment. We’ve also received in the past, money from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Connecting Kids to Coverage Grant for Medicaid and CHIP outreach, education and enrollment. So this year we combined both of those under this one grant and we’ve partnered with Washington County Opportunities Inc. to do some of that work,” said Minor. “This year, because we had some additional funding that came in because of the pandemic, even though we’re headquartered in Hernando, we decided to distribute that to our collaborators.”
Minor noted while the portion available for WCOI totaled $20,000, his organization found another $5,000 to award, which was a “surprise” to WCOI officials.
“We’re giving them a total of $25,000 in reimbursement for the use of their facilities, although they were providing them at no charge,” he pointed out. “But once we had those funds available, we wanted to bless them with that so they could then do additional work that was needed.”
Jones regarded the partnership as indeed a “blessing” to WCOI.
“With headstart and early headstart, we’re required to ensure each year that our children receive a physical, dental and vision screening and a sensory screening. And, oftentimes what we find out is that some of our parents have not either applied for medical benefits through CHIP, Medicaid, or private insurance and it requires a lot from our program to try to work with those parents to get them enrolled and registered and everything like that,” he said. “So, when this partnership came along we looked at this and said, ‘well this will benefit our children and our families because they don’t have the access in the Mississippi Delta to these enrollment opportunities.’”
Jones continued, “They brought in these enrollment opportunities giving them access and then we basically supplied facilities and staffing to kind of help out. Also what that did was help us to supplement some of the salaries of our staff members because we’re in a situation with the pandemic where we’ve been having issues with staff retention. So this has helped us out with staff retention as well.”
Jones added he and his staff are excited about the opportunity to receive additional funding as it will allow for the purchasing of various necessities and supplies such as PPE’s to ensure the health and safety of the children, families and staff.
