The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention accepted the recommendations of a Scientific Advisory Board to lower the level of concern for childhood lead poisoning on May 16, 2012. The new reference value, which is based on population blood lead levels, would focus action on those children with the highest blood lead levels (i.e. those above the 97.5th percentile). Currently, that reference value would set the level of concern at 5.0 ug/dL.
The Healthy Homes Coalition is offering a one-day training on Integrated Pest Management in Multi-Family Housing Wednesday, June 27, 2012. The training will be held in Community Room A at the Kent County DHS buiding, 121 Franklin Street SE, Grand Rapids.
The Healthy Homes Coalition is taking applications for a full-time Outreach Worker position to begin early summer 2012.
Come learn how the healthy Homes Coalition helps parents protect children from environmental health hazards in the home by joining us for a Building Healthy Homes Tour. These brief lunch hour tours are a wonderful chance for you to hear some real stories about the work that we do at Healthy Homes.
Reserve your space today by calling (616) 241-3300 or emailing us.
Click on the title above to learn more and to see other future tour dates for 2011!
In September 2011, a Scientific Advisory Board convened by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reviewed the evidence to determine if there would be any health benefits to the residents when a municipality replaces old, leaded water service lines to individual homes. What they discovered was counterintuitive. In brief, when only part of a lead service line is replaced, the evidence more often than not suggests that there may be a short term increase in the amount of lead in drinking water.
What does this mean for Grand Rapids?
Get the Lead Out! partners were notified on March 23, 2012 that the City of Grand Rapids has been awarded nearly $2.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to re-start the wildly successful Get the Lead Out! Home Repair program.
"A ten-month old baby is at the DeVos Children’s Hospital after a severe case of lead poisoning that was discovered last week in Grand Rapids, " according to FOX-17 reporter Carl Apple. The Healthy Homes Coalition worked with Carl to get this story out, hoping to alert the community to the fact that lead poisoning is still a very real and present danger in Grand Rapids.
The Healthy Homes Coalition is a new non-profit that is seeking to eliminate housing conditions in west Michigan that harm children's health. The Coalition is an outgrowth of the successful Get the Lead Out! campaign, and was incorporated in the summer of 2006 to sustain the effort to end childhood lead poisoning in Grand Rapids and to apply lessons learned in lead to other children's environmental health issues.
Our work has its roots in the inception of the Get the Lead Out! collaborative, which was formed in 2001 in response to local data that called out the environmental injustice of childhood lead poisoning in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In 2000, 559 Kent County children 0-5 years of age were identified with elevated blood lead levels. More than 90% of those children lived in the City of Grand Rapids. More than 90% were low-income (Medicaid). And the vast majority were children of color. A map similar to the one on this page showed the huge disparity. In the north end of the Baxter neighborhood, two out of every five children tested that year had elevated blood lead levels!
The Get the Lead Out! collaborative was facilitated as a pilot project of the Community Leadership Institute at Aquinas College. As the pilot phase came to an end in 2005, collaboration leaders met to plan for the future. Even though the incidence of childhood lead poisoning in Grand Rapids' neighborhoods was cut by 60%, the group decided that the work to end childhood lead poisoning needed to continue, and that we needed to take lessons learned from the successful Get the Lead Out! campaign and apply them to other children's environmental health issues.
To sustain these efforts, the Healthy Homes Coalition of West Michigan was incorporated as a non-profit organization with the State of Michigan in August 2006, the same year that the Get the Lead Out! campaign was recognized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with a Children's Environmental Health Excellence Award. Shortly thereafter the organization secured its tax-exempt status with the IRS.
Today, Healthy Homes focuses on childhood lead poisoning, carbon monoxide and radon. We are building a strong, solid foundation to eliminate these threats and continue to build our comprehensive approach to ensuring that children's homes are healthy and free from environmental harm.
Consider joining us and being a part of our future!
Making sure children grow up in homes that are healthy and safe is everyone’s job! The Healthy Homes Coalition is a tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Learn more about specific ways you can help protect children. Connect with us today!
742 Franklin St. SE // Grand Rapids, MI 49507 // 616.241.3300 p // 616.241.3327 f // info@healthyhomescoalition.org
Special thanks to the Dyer-Ives Foundation for their generous support of this website. © 2006-2012 Healthy Homes Coalition.
