FAIRMONT – Starting out as the brainchild of Executive Director Chera Sevcik at Faribault and Martin County Health and Human Services (FMCHS), the Collaborative for Rural Public Health Innovation (CRPHI) has been awarded the 2025 Association of Minnesota Counties (AMC) Achievement Award.

CRPHI emerged when FMCHS received a $530,000 grant to expand a pilot program they had worked on with Minnesota State University-Mankato. Sevcik said the partnership sparked as they sought to address an issue commonly seen in rural public health.

“As compared to a more urbanized or metro community, community health board or health department is we don’t have a huge number of staff,” she said. “We have the same expectations for delivering public health services. That includes things like data analysis and data collection so we can understand what’s going on within our communities.”

To combat this, FMCHS began collaborating with MSU Mankato in 2022 to incorporate some FMCHS work into public health schooling coursework and offer internships. Sevcik said these avenues turned out well, and when state funding became available in 2024, they started to think bigger.

“The intent of the funds is to explore different possible innovative models,” she said. “We thought, ‘Well, that’s working well for the partnership we have with MSU and our agency.’ We wondered if it would work well if we expanded the work to include other counties across the region, and worked together as counties, as well as with the university.”

Today, 26 counties are included in CRPHI, including Nicollet, Renville, Kandiyohi, Watonwan, Brown, McLeod and other counties stretching from the South Dakota Border up near northern Minnesota.

Through this collaboration, Sevcik said they have been able to pool resources and streamline programs across all the counties.

“Our partnership has really done a lot of work to create a campaign focused on helping our community understand cannabis laws, the dangers of cannabis, the risks of cannabis and making sure we’re doing harm reduction work. We’ve done a campaign available to everybody who is simultaneously implementing it together. If you’re in New Ulm, Marshall, you’re going to see some of the same elements no matter where you go.”

By collaborating, Sevcik said they aim to ensure that every person in Minnesota has access to the same level of public health services.

“The role of public health is to serve everyone in the community,” she said. “Not just a specific population, but to support overall health and well-being for the whole community. To do that, we’re working behind the scenes, doing a lot of work related to data collection, analysis, then taking that data and making it actionable, implementing programs as a result of the data we have.”

Through analyzing this data, Sevcik said they have been able to identify mental health challenges consistent across all community health improvement plans the counties created, as well as the aforementioned cannabis campaign.

“We’re in the process of collecting information about developing a community response or communications campaign around mental health,” she said. “Especially geared towards maybe middle-aged, older men, or even men who are dads, just to better understand what their needs are. What do they value? How do we speak to them in a way that resonates with them? Where are the best places to reach them?”

As CRPHI has been utilized, Sevcik said it is central to public health to have partnerships like these.

“Naturally, public health is partnering,” she said. “We’re constantly looking to partner with our community. We want to be that convener, and we have a really good relationship as directors across the counties that are participating. We are connecting pretty frequently. Having that university partnership, offering that different perspective that a lot of the health directors haven’t necessarily had either, because it’s a unique partnership.”

Given the coalition has only been around for 18 months, Sevcik said they are blown away by the amount of work they have been able to do and the recognition they are receiving for doing so.

“The right players came to the table,” she said. “We hired amazing staff and contractors to help us do this work, and things have grown more than we could have ever imagined. To be able to be recognized for this work, especially in public health, when your work is often behind the scenes and not necessarily visible to the community, it means a lot to our collaborative team to have this recognition.”

CRPHI is currently working on getting a second grant to continue and expand its work for the next two years. For more information on CRPHI, visit powerofpublichealthmn.com.