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Mason Matters
Mason County, Washington
Community Size: 50,000
Program Started: 1998

Cross-Pollinating Community Resources:
Local Healthcare Dollars Well Spent

Creatively encouraging things to grow is a specialty of Kim Klint’s, both in the communities of Mason County and in her own backyard. When Kim noticed that bees were arriving to her yard too late in the season for the fruit on her apple and pear trees to fully ripen, she decided to help them out. Each spring, she walks from tree to tree, Q-tip in hand, carefully using one of the soft ends to pollinate every blossom she can reach. This kind of patience and imagination is also a trademark of Kim’s work as Executive Director of Mason Matters, an innovative non-profit organization. Mason Matters strives to bring focus to emerging health and social issues that affect the quality of life of county residents and then work with the community to identify “Mason County” solutions.

Summit Helps Community Identify Priorities

One of the organization’s recent successes was an all-day community summit on Children, Youth, and Families attended by 117 people. In the months before the summit, Mason Matters hired an epidemiologist to help sift through and compile relevant information about their county in an accessible way. Community members read the packets beforehand and arrived ready to dive into dialogue. They emerged 8 hours later with several priorities including: Integration of services; Family-wage Jobs; and Housing. Now the Mason Matters Board of Directors is ready to think about those priorities and determine where to best use its resources to create change and build capacity.

“Really good, make-a-difference work can be done with just people pulling together,” Klint said. “It’s not like we need huge amounts of dollars or expertise. We can really make a difference by bringing together what we have as a community and moving that forward.”

Patching together Community Resources

During the past year, Mason Matters has made several major contributions to the community by finding ways to leverage community resources. When Kim realized that many valuable people were leaving their work as teacher’s aides in a local elementary school because their 30-32 hour positions weren’t providing enough income, she found a way to round out a position to a full-time job by using other community dollars to fund an additional 8 hours of needed community outreach and support. Mason Matters is also committed to hearing all of Mason County’s voices. In the past year, Mason Matters has helped organize four major community events in the north to gather information that will help this county, whose main population centers are 20 miles apart, move forward in a more unified way. The board has also undertaken several initiatives to support the county’s growing Latino community, partnering with the Washington Health Foundation to provide a grant for an interpreter services coordinator at the hospital and securing funding to develop a Latino drop-in resource center.

Local Investments in Health Promotion

Because Mason Matters pursues a broad range of issues, a striking aspect of the organization is its somewhat non-traditional funding sources. Since its inception in 1998, the work has been funded equally by a grant from Mason General Hospital and the Mason County Department of Health. This funding arrangement means that any non-local grant money coming into the community through Mason Matters can be used directly in projects rather than go to overhead costs. “Both the Hospital and the County have invested a lot,” Kim said. “They are investing in the community in the true definition of health promotion: realizing that small amounts of effort can make really positive changes before people really need the safety net of hospitals and health departments. Neither the county nor the hospital says what we need to focus on. They allow community process to identify the needs.”

Kim is very passionate about the benefits of community process. “All it takes is having an idea, framing it, and bringing the right people together at the table, then they get all excited and go... It’s just a matter of being able to cross-pollinate.”

Contact:

Kimberley Klint, Executive Director
kak@co.mason.wa.us
Mason Matters
PO Box 1580, Shelton, WA. 98584
360 / 427-9670, ext. 543
www.masonmatters.org 

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