Health work in Minnesota, before $220 million in cuts, wins a national award

Washington County has been awarded for its work in opioid settlement planning. At the same time, the state is experiencing deep cuts in funding for the Minnesota Department of Health.

“These are very worrisome times,” said Minnesota Department of Health Commissioner Dr. Brooke Cunningham.

She says the federal government’s actions to cancel more than $220 million in grant funds have her department scrambling amidst layoffs and uncertainty. “We are feeling an attack on public health in ways that are unprecedented and concerning,” Cunningham said.

Since the cuts, the department has had to lay off 170 workers and take a hard look at what critical work can be saved. “There are so many spreadsheets,” Cunningham added.

While the grant funding originated during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was in response to decades of underfunding and intended to address gaps in the department. “We’ve been under-resourced for decades and felt the pain of that underinvestment during the pandemic,” Cunningham explained. “We’re trying not to go back there and this money was to expand upon those lessons and create solutions in more substantive ways.”

Cunningham says the grants issued by the federal government addressed a breadth of concerns and programming in Minnesota. The uncertainty of how to pay for programs has her worried that progress in Minnesota will not only stop, but we could go backwards.

“If the Environmental Protection Agency gets cut, our ability to show up for communities to make sure the water that comes out of the tap is clean and safe is impacted.”

Additional areas of concern include WIC, which stands for Women, Infants, and Children. The program helps eligible pregnant women, new mothers, babies, and young children by providing nutritious foods, education, counseling, and referrals to health and social services.

Cunningham says there are real concerns about the impacts on many other areas of public health, including infectious disease surveillance and prevention, which are important given increases in diseases like measles.

The cuts come at a time when work in Minnesota is not only making a difference, but winning awards. Washington County was just honored with a prestigious honor from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health for excellence in the application of opioid litigation principles, including its 2023 input survey and fair and transparent process for where to spend the funding.

“It’s a great example of how Washington County is using the socioecological model, attacking things at all levels and working with the community to make a big difference,” said Catherine Diamond, interim director of the Division of Injury Prevention and Mental Health at the Minnesota Department of Health.

Examples of the award-winning work in Washington County include programs like Project Salud, which addresses an increased level of opioid misuse in the Latino community. Your Path, founded in 2020, uses technology to quickly get help and resources to people suffering from substance use disorders. In Forest Lake, a new recovery community called WayMakers is using its opioid settlement funds to onboard and train Certified Peer Recovery Specialists (CPRS) to strengthen the recovery community through improving access to medication-assisted therapy and harm reduction. The work is even happening on a church level. In Scandia, Pastor Seth Perry of Elim Lutheran Church used his award from Washington County to tell his story of addiction and recovery through his podcast and docuseries called “Our Stigma”.

“We’re looking at community-led activities to be a leader in combating substance misuse,” Diamond added. 

Each program in Washington County is an example of how funding can drive communities to make change and provide hope in times of uncertainty.

“There’s a high degree of fear,” Cunningham added. “As we think about how we move forward, my message is that all of us have agency.” She says the power of public health is in people and communities that learn to cope and press on despite the chaos.

“We have to make sure we create new spaces to unify, because the power is still with the people.”