Our response to COVID-19 through supporting healthy families

A village elder gets his blood pressure checked by a health ambassador. Photo taken of Healthy Family Initiative before Covid-19 mask mandates.

This year has been an extraordinary year for our Healthy Family Initiative as we continue to face down a global pandemic, challenging us to continue to add COVID-19 related support to our regular programming. One of our most significant Covid-19 related initiatives is assisting in logistics planning and securing accommodations for community members to increase access to COVID-19 vaccinations. By doing so, we help make it easier for individuals to get to local government mandated community health clinics, known locally as Puskesmas, where community members can receive their vaccine from the local government. Critical to the success of this initiative is community outreach, where we provide information and counseling to villagers within the villages we partner with about the vaccine and COVID-19 related health information. Over the next two to three months, our goal is to assist in the vaccinations of at least 400 at-risk individuals within the communities we partner with. 

In our own organization, our COVID-19 response has been strong as we have provided vaccinations to 24 of our staff members allowing us to reach a milestone of having over 50% of our staff vaccinated in Pontianak, Indonesia.

Overall, our Healthy Family Initiative is aimed at supporting partner villages by proactively supporting healthy habits and treating individuals who are sick. Running a health clinic is no easy task so we work with health ambassadors, who are typically women, within each community by providing training, equipment and other means of support so they can successfully run each clinic. Currently, we have 132 health ambassadors working across 14 Conservation Cooperatives within our project sites. The organization of our traveling health clinics is composed of several stations including registration, health screening, consultation with a medical professional, a pharmacy and additional education and information regarding participants' continued health plan. Each of these stations helps maximize the benefit to each individual and helps serve community members with specific needs and of varying ages.  This program is conducted in collaboration with local Puskesmas. The annual target of these travel clinics is to visit each of these regions at least three times for consistent health services support. 

    So far this year, we have provided close to 500 community members with life-saving medical treatment, medications and evaluations to help them lead a healthy life. For the next several months, our goal is to continue these programs reaching additional community members throughout our project sites of Kubu Raya, Gunung Nyiut and Gunung Nanning.

A young child gets a check up by one of the many health ambassadors we have helped train. Photo taken of Healthy Family Initiative before Covid-19 mask mandates.

     We have learned a lot over the past few years of running this initiative as a regular part of our Conservation Cooperative Program. Looking forward, we plan on increasing the capacity of our health ambassadors among our project sites as well as develop systems to strengthen communication between our health ambassadors and our staff to increase support for these programs. This program is extremely important, not just in a pandemic, but in the long term development and support of rural communities who live alongside critically endangered habitats and wildlife. When community member health is prioritized, sustainable and conservation focused practices become possible, putting communities in a better position to govern their natural resources, become independent and prosper. 

     For more information regarding our Healthy Family Initiative, visit our Community Health page.