By Jan Hayes
The Sanford Herald
There is no shortage of heartwarming stories in our community about how individuals and organizations are helping neighbors escape poverty.
BackPack Pals feeds hundreds of poor children on weekends during the school year, so they can learn more in class. Children get the nourishment they need, allowing them to focus on learning and develop the knowledge and skills needed to pull themselves out of a bad situation and find success in life.
Family Promise helps homeless parents and children get on the path to financial stability. Volunteers begin by giving homeless families a place to stay, food to eat and transportation to work. Then, they help families develop personalized plans to get the education or training they need before moving into their own home.
And those are just two initiatives highlighted recently in this column. There are many more taking place in our community at this very moment.
Some have asked whether all of this is necessary to the community at large.
The answer is a resounding, “yes.”
More proof came late last month in a report from NC Child, a nonprofit promoting public policy to improve life for children across the state. The organization — which draws its board membership from respected medical centers, ministries and nonprofits — published its 2014 Child Health Report Card, which concludes that how long children live and the quality of their lives depend a lot on where they are born. And Lee County has a lot of work to do.
The report covers a lot of ground, but here are three of the major points:
* One of 15 births in North Carolina (6.6 percent) is to a mother who received very late or no prenatal care, which places the child at risk for birth defects or other long-term conditions that might be avoided. In surrounding counties, the figures are on par with the state average or slightly better. In Chatham, the figure also is one in 15 (6.6 percent). In Moore and Harnett, it’s a little better at one in 17 births (5.9 percent) and one in 18 births (5.7 percent) respectively.
But here at home, one out of every 10 births — 10.4 percent to be exact — is to a woman who received late or no prenatal care.
Across North Carolina, about one in four children (24.9 percent) lives in poverty, which means they are more likely to suffer from health problems as they grow older. Those include conditions like diabetes, heart disease, obesity and developmental delays. There’s marginally better news in Chatham (19.4 percent) and Harnett (22.2 percent). But children don’t fare as well in Moore (26.4 percent) or Lee (28.6 percent).
Here’s one final statistic from the much-longer report: About 595,240 children across the Tar Heel State (6.1 percent) are what NC Child calls “food insecure,” meaning they live in households struggling to provide healthy, nutritious food for the family.
By now, you can probably guess what follows. It’s not great news for any of our neighboring counties — the figures are 21.1 percent in Chatham, 24.8 percent in Harnett and 25.9 percent in Moore — but higher here in Lee. About 27 percent of our own children live in these struggling families.
The point isn’t to bombard and bore you with numbers and statistics that, frankly, can make anyone’s head spin. But the bottom line is that we have a lot of work to do and — as BackPack Pals and Family Promise prove — we can make a difference. Or, as it was put by Laila A. Bell, director of research and data at NC Child: “These health challenges are largely avoidable.”
It’s compassionate that we improve life for our neighbors who are struggling. But it’s also important for our entire community’s well-being. An unhealthy community means more infrastructure and expenses are needed to care for medical, educational and other challenges that didn’t have to arise in the first place. High poverty, poor public health and the conditions they bring also make us less attractive to companies looking for a place to locate with good jobs. This is something that affects us all.
There may be no cure for poverty in every case, in every single situation. There’s no magic wand we can wave to make sure everyone has meaningful work, enough money and a successful life. But that doesn’t mean we can’t help a lot of our neighbors. That’s a good thing for everyone.
“How Healthy Are Lee Children?,” a two-page, local report from NC Child, is now available from United Way of Lee County at leecountyunitedway.org/report.pdf.