PORT TOWNSEND — It is Thursday afternoon, and Jean Baldwin, director of Health and Human Services for Jefferson County, is sitting in her office in Castle Hill Mall on Sims Hill.
On her desk is a 98-page report giving a statistical picture of the population she is responsible for — pyramids of age distribution data, pie charts of poverty, bar graphs of tobacco and alcohol use, jagged lines of education and income levels.
The problem — how to move from information to action, from statistics to solutions.
“How do you mobilize a community to make a difference?” Baldwin asks.
Baldwin hopes the community will come up with answers to that question at a series of open houses scheduled for the next two weeks.
The second stage of a countywide effort called Healthy Jefferson, the informal gatherings will provide people with a chance to see what resources are available and map out a plan to focus those resources on three interconnected issues — lack of family-wage jobs, alcohol and drug abuse, and the impact of both on families with children.
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The rest of the story appears in Sunday’s Peninsula Daily News Jefferson County edition.