GREENFIELD — With nearly $1.47 million in funding from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, two Franklin County organizations will be tackling projects on institutional racism in population health and digital equity in aging.
The Franklin County Community Development Corporation and United Way of the Franklin & Hampshire Region were among 31 organizations chosen to receive funding for local projects working to address factors that impact the health and well-being of residents, such as healthy food and housing, behavioral health and healthy aging, as well as the impacts of institutional racism on population health.
The Franklin County CDC will be working to expand its racial justice initiatives, with a particular focus on addressing inequities and institutional racism in population health, thanks to a $994,290 Policy, Systems & Environmental Change grant from the state Department of Public Health. Meanwhile, United Way was awarded $472,845 through a Healthy Aging grant that will help the nonprofit continue its technical support services.
Franklin County CDC
Traci Talbert, racial justice community engagement director at the Franklin County CDC, said that its $994,290 will be divided to support several different initiatives over the next five years. Initiatives range from holding community workshops focused on mindfulness, interpersonal relationships and personal development, to developing an online Racial Justice Reflective Journey tool for businesses and organizations.
The grant will continue work that Talbert began in 2020 to expand the Franklin County CDC’s depth of knowledge regarding racial justice and its impact on community and business relationships. She has hosted workshops and the Welcoming and Belonging Group, which holds discussions on microaggressions, linguistic bias and coded language. She also began developing an online tool geared toward helping businesses better understand how to address structural racism. She hopes to finish the tool with this grant.
“What I’ve learned through this process is that the approach needs to be industry-specific,” Talbert said. “When you want to have a racial justice conversation or support any initiatives with racial justice that [businesses and organizations] have, what does that look like? … There’s no general kind of blanketed conversation to have with racial justice.”
Working alongside Talbert will be co-collaborators Angela Campbell, vice president of institutional mission, culture and climate at Greenfield Community College; Janine Fondon, founder of UnityFirst.com; Mpress Bennu Nembhard, founder of Moving Mountains Media; and Mari Severin, an artist and activist who has worked with the Franklin County CDC on previous racial justice initiatives.
Each co-collaborator will take a different approach to the project’s mission. For example, Severin said she plans to host workshops centered on mindfulness where they can “emotionally equip community members to sustainably engage in internal and collective racial justice work.”
“We each have a specialty,” Severin said. “We’re each gonna have a little corner that creates that whole of this grant funding.”
“One thing that I think continues to be a sore spot or an Achilles heel on the work of racial justice is people’s fear of seeing racial justice for what it is,” Talbert said. “Somehow it’s a personal attack on them and they can’t actually navigate the conversations. So I love what Mari is doing. Her role is to get people to understand what’s happening in their body and their mind when these conversations come up.”
Talbert and Severin have spoken to more than 80 community members as part of the development of the reflective journey tool, which Talbert said will provide industry-specific analysis and structure on what racial justice can look like in that particular field.
Severin said the tool has gone through several iterations in recent years, and in its current form, they’ve created a game-like tool.
“You’ll get to pick an avatar and it’ll actually navigate you through real-world challenges,” Severin explained.
Severin said other initiatives the team will be working on include financial literacy programming for middle and high school students, and the development of a digital magazine highlighting community work and under-represented voices in the Pioneer Valley.
“We are committed to joining this great effort to engage entities and amplify voices across Franklin County — all in hopes that our collaborative efforts will make the region stronger, better, and more connected for impact and success,” Fondon said in a statement. “This project will allow us all to get beyond the headlines and create a deeper understanding and roadmap marking new opportunities for success today and tomorrow. Success comes much more easily when everyone is fully present in ways that reimagine what’s possible.”
United Way
The United Way was awarded $472,845 through the Healthy Aging grant, which will help the nonprofit continue to run its Digital Navigator program.
The program provides one-on-one and group tech support, trains partner agencies to provide digital support and advocates for state policies supporting affordable broadband. Over the next five years, the grant will also support establishing a community-informed steering committee that includes older adults with lived experience, and expanding patient portal and telehealth training with healthcare partners.
Rich Vaden, who has been working as the United Way’s digital navigator since the spring of 2025, explained that as the region’s population continues to age, and as society continues to shift toward a greater digital presence, teaching older people who did not grow up with computers and the internet how to use them is important to support healthy aging. He described his role as a “community help worker” that assists in creating digital equity.
Whether it’s scheduling medical appointments, paying rent, or applying for Medicare or other forms of assistance, “pretty much everything nowadays requires you to do it online,” Vaden said.
“Digital natives” may think it’s easy to swipe, scroll and tap devices, but Vaden said computers, cellphones and the internet are more complicated than that, and those who didn’t grow up with the tools, or didn’t learn how to use them as the technology was developed, can be left in the gap as the world continues to move online.
“If you don’t have the skills or devices, you’re in a bad place,” echoed Geoff Naunheim, president and CEO of United Way of the Franklin & Hampshire Region. “This is really important.”
Naunheim said the Digital Navigator program began last year in partnership with the Alliance for Digital Equity. The program was federally funded and has since had its funding cut by the Trump administration. The state-funded Healthy Aging grant will allow the program to continue for the next five years.
“This isn’t a program that helps people once and moves on. It’s steady, relationship-based support that keeps people connected to their health, their benefits and each other,” Naunheim said in a statement. “This grant lets us keep that support in place for the long term, and grow it to reach more of our neighbors.”
Vaden said that since he was hired as a digital navigator, he has seen more than 900 individuals and has held dozens of group workshops at libraries and senior centers across the Franklin County. He does not see the need decreasing anytime soon.
“The need is just overwhelming,” Vaden said. “There’s never a place I go where there is no one that needs help.”
