Horizons group attends conference

Last week, Horizons group members Wayne and Sarah Flohr and Bill Coons returned from a three day conference in Bloomington, Minn., concentrating on the economic situations of residents of small rural towns.

Horizons is a group that is a part of the Northwest Area Foundation (NAF). The NAF encompasses the states that were served by the great northern railroad: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa.

In order to be eligible to attend, Coons and the Flohrs applied online using their local zip code. They received scholarship money in the amount of almost $2000, and the WSU Extension paid the remainder.

Other state universities have an Extension office for Horizons. Many non-profit organizations as well as Horizons members attended. Sarah said many professionals in the social work field also attended the conference to learn tools to overcome poverty in rural and urban areas.

Wayne Flohr commented that he felt the conference "was a great opportunity to see how people from different parts of the country can come together and work on bettering the lives of those who are in poverty.”

Horizons looks at communities throughout the state of Washington to see if they are rural and impoverished enough to qualify. The organization looked at the 98612 zip code, which only covers Cathlamet and Puget Island, Coons said, but they want to take the information they learned to Skamokawa and Grays River, to cover all of Wahkiakum County.

The unobtainable goal is to abolish poverty, Sarah said.

“Poverty also has that somewhat negative connotation, and part of the conversation in the program was to broaden your understanding of poverty, meaning, it could be just a lack of resources,” Coons said. “What resources do we need here that we don’t have?”

Dissention in the community is one of Sarah’s main concerns.

“I think the lack of working together keeps us back from moving forward,” she said. In the old days, people were able to ‘break bread’ together after a days work, but anymore, it doesn’t happen.

She added because this is a small community with people doing so many different things, it makes it difficult to work together.

“When people are segregated like that, it really holds us back. It’s a national epidemic; it isn’t just local," she said.

“This is clearly an opportunity to try to bring all the non-profits in the county together just to share information on what people are doing,” Coons said. Both St. James Family Center and the Wahkiakum Community Foundation are both such assets to the area.

“We don’t want to change the face we want to build what we have,” Sarah said. “The stuff we already have here is amazing.”

The ultimate goal of Horizons isn’t just a community center but an umbrella that encourages a grassroots initiative, Coons said. A steering committee has other plans in the works. For example, they would like to reduce toll telephone charges from the east side of the county to the west side.

“It just further divides us,” he said.

Coons said Wahkiakum County can change with the vision of people already here and “not bring in consultants saying, ‘what you need is’.”

Sarah said she would like to invite all the non-profits that serve the county to contact her if they are interested in working together as a team.

“Let bygones be bygones and let’s do it. Let’s build on this. Because we can do it!” she said.