Northfield Healthy Community Initiative

Now entering its 20th year, HCI is one of the longest-running youth collaboratives in the country. HCI is in the final year of a 10-year, non-renewable federal grant. As a result, after this year, HCI will lose more than half of its annual funding.

Please take a moment to read a bit more below about HCI’s work and consider making a tax-deductible donation:

• Over the past eight years, through its grant-writing efforts, HCI has helped bring in over $4 million from funding sources outside the community to support the Northfield schools, local youth projects, and area organizations.

• HCI was the winner of the statewide “Outstanding Organization Award ” from the Minnesota Community Education Association. The association recognized HCI’s success in building community collaboration around youth issues and addressing identified community needs.

• During the first six years of the HCI-supported Tackling Obstacles and Raising College Hopes (TORCH) graduation initiative, over 90% of Northfield Latino seniors graduated from high school and over two-thirds enrolled in postsecondary institutions. Over the five previous years before TORCH, the graduation rate for Latino students in Northfield had been 36%.

• Over the past year, more than 1,000 Northfield youth (unduplicated) participated in one of the free PRIMEtime after school programs, which HCI helps to convene. Most of these young people come from economically-disadvantaged homes and/or have multiple risk factors present in their lives.

• HCI partnered with local law enforcement and other community entities to launch the “Take It to The Box” medication disposal program this year. During the program’s first two years, more than 5,100 pounds of no-longer-needed medication were collected in the local police stations -- that's over 2.5 tons!

• HCI helped start and continues to support the Northfield Youth Sports Collaborative, a coalition of Northfield sports organizations that works together to help increase the number of youth involved in sports. Since it began in 2004, the Youth Sports Collaborative has provided over 900 scholarships to low-income Northfield youth, totaling over $80,000.

• Over the past year five years, activities supported by HCI mini-grants have involved over 10,000 youth.

Because it does not run specific programs per se, HCI is uniquely positioned to help build bridges between groups and to pull partners together to look strategically at community issues and solutions. Consequently, HCI has been repeatedly trumpeted as a “champion” for youth organizations in the community, able to provide the extensive support and connections that these groups need to further their work, but are unable to do themselves.