Howardville Community Partnership, Missouri
Missouri map showing the Missouri Bootheel area
Partnership: Howardville serves as a model for Bootheel communities by promoting new medical clinics, improving water quality, securing funding, and planning for redevelopment.
Goal:
- To honor Howardville as a historic African American
community - To build “Bootheel” coalition to support safe land reuse to
improve community health - To combat community health inequities: environmental
pollution, blighted properties, unemployment, and lack of
access to healthy foods and recreation - To plan for clinics, improved water quality, funding, and
redevelopment
Howardville High School (Lloyd DeGrane, 2019).
Community and population:
- Located in Bootheel of Missouri in New Madrid County
- Primarily African American (92.4%)
- Lower median income and higher poverty rate (over 30%) than New Madrid County as a whole
- Loss of local employers (closing and downsizing businesses)
- Decay of Howardville High school—loss of a cultural icon
Image of an old sharecropper cottage in the Missouri Bootheel (Lloyd DeGrane, 2018).
Local Howardville resident John Anderson, trained in lead safe renovation during cleanup of the Howardville School (Lloyd DeGrane, 2018).
- The Bootheel area is littered with petroleum brownfields, abandoned cotton gins, and boarded buildings
- organic compounds), lead, and asbestos
Some of the lowest county health rankings in the state; limited access to healthy food and medical care
- Small grocery stores, but many Howardville and Bootheel residents drive to Sikeston (about 20 miles away) or other, more populated Bootheel towns to access a full range of fresh produce
- Only full healthcare possibility for many Bootheel families: two local hospitals (which have lost hospital status but remain medical care centers), 25 miles north and south of Howardville
- While there is a local health department that provides some basic healthcare in New Madrid, there is no specialty care locally; patients transferred to Memphis (2 hours), Cape Girardeau (about 1 hour), or St. Louis (2.5 hours)
BROWN assistance and collaboration
- Technical assistance to supplement EPA Cleanup Grant to remediate lead and asbestos exposure for 400 residents and workers (including Head Start children). Clean-up jobs for two residents
- National recognition: 2 feature stories; write-up in Bloomberg magazine.
- Connection to resources for historic preservation—registration for state and federal historic preservation in 2017/2018; $10,400 raised by school restoration committee (2010-2019)
- Assistance with cleanup of abandoned petroleum tanks: lists and maps of locations throughout Bootheel; connection to a state program for assistance with inventory and site assessment
- 2017 community meeting using ATSDR Land Reuse (Healthfield) Toolkit to encourage participation in community revitalization
- $95,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health Leaders Program Funding awarded over 3 years for Healthfields redevelopment
- Howardville School and Senior Housing Redevelopment concept plan
- Training for 15 community leaders and partners to pursue up to $500,000 in EPA Coalition Assessment funds for New Madrid, Pemiscot, and Dunklin Counties
- Attendance by 3 community leaders at July 2018 EPA Community Involvement Training in Kansas City, MO.
References:
County Health Rankings and Roadmaps. (2018). Missouri. Retrieved from: https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/app/missouri/2018/overview
United States Census. (2010). Howardville City, Missouri. Retrieved from: https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml?src=bkmk
United States Census. (2017). New Madrid County, Missouri. Retrieved from: https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/community_facts.xhtml?src=bkmk