1702-12994

Virginia: Support to the Petersburg Wellness Consortium (PWC) to act as a lead grassroots convener in the Petersburg community as part of the Grassroots Engagement Strategy. The Petersburg Oral Health Engagement Project of the PWC uses a multi-prolonged approach to facilitate engagement with various leadership and grassroots groups with the long-term view of developing capacity and sustainability to address oral health concerns. During the past year, PWC has focused on building sustainability hubs with key community partners who have the capacity to integrate an oral health agenda into their existing work. In addition, PWC has also worked to harness grassroots participation by training local residents to become Oral Health Champions. This process started with educating Wellness Ambassadors about oral health and engaging them as partners in the development of various aspects of the broader engagement strategy. Oral Health 2020 investment of $100,800 will be used to work on three major oral health priority areas which include education, advocacy, and policy. Specifically, the focus of PWC’s education goals will be on increasing awareness within PWC’s community partners on the importance of oral health integration and providing them with training and resources to better equip them in disseminating information to the community. Advocacy goals will target capacity building and training within the community to effectively advocate for oral health integration. Finally, the policy goal will seek to extend the advocacy activities and to expand the breadth of community partner networks to advocate for oral health integration at the state and local levels. All actions described in the proposal work plan for the Year 3 work were organized around the systems change framework (policy, financing, care and community). This proposal aligns with the Oral Health 2020 Goal 6 of improving the public perception of the value of oral health to overall health and the target that oral health is increasingly included in health dialogue and public policy.