Author: Angie Sykeny

Community health workers assist police in Manchester

Last month, a new Public Health and Safety Team (PHAST), funded through the American Rescue Plan Act, was formed to serve the City of Manchester, combining the efforts of the Manchester Police and Manchester Public Health departments. The team consists of eight Community Health Workers who are trained in advocacy, conflict resolution and “violence interruption,” an evidence-based response technique for non-police and non-emergency matters to help reduce violent crime. PHAST supervisor Biram Saidybah shared more about how the team serves the city’s residents and allows the police department to focus on issues that require the services of law enforcement.

How and why was PHAST created?

The Manchester Police Department had been receiving a lot of calls … and many of those calls were [about] something that has nothing to do with what law enforcement [handles] … and usually nothing to do with violence. The city realized that maybe it could have another team of people respond to those calls, and that’s how the idea for a Public Health and Safety Team was conceived. … The intention is for us to partner with the police and to inherit those calls that are not law enforcement [issues] … freeing up maybe up to six or eight police officers to be able to concentrate on violence issues.

What qualifications do PHAST workers have?

They all have training to be a community health worker, and some have years of experience working as a community health worker. … Some of us have also lived the same experiences that the people we are serving are currently living, and we want them to also be able to achieve their dreams in America. … It’s also a multilingual and multicultural team. We felt that hiring people who can speak more than one language would be the best way to reach out to a wider community. … Everybody has a unique skill that the others don’t have, so the team has a combination of unique skills. … Anytime we receive a call, we’ll look at who is the best person [to respond to] that call, based on their character and skills here, so that we can address it in the best possible way. … Finally, everyone has a story about why they joined this team. Every one of us on this team is dedicated and loves this community, loves the job that we’re doing and loves to serve people.

What types of calls does PHAST respond to?

One type is what’s called wellness checks or condition checks. … If someone goes to an individual’s house, knocks at the door and nobody answers and they aren’t able to get in communication with that individual, typically they call the police to come check on that individual. … Then, there are people who are repeat callers, who will call the police department three, four, five times in a month. They may be people who have mental health challenges, people who are just lonely and need to talk to somebody, or people who are having issues, like they’re about to be evicted or they don’t know how to apply for health insurance, things like that. Many of those calls are also from seniors who are living by themselves and don’t have anyone there to help them with things in their day-to-day life, so anytime they’re confronted with something [they need help with], they call the police. … Another type of call is for what’s referred to as ‘hotspots,’ neighborhoods that the police receive a lot of calls from or that may have a lot of crime going on.

In addition to responding to those calls, what else does PHAST do?

Part of our partnership with the Police Department [involves] the Community Response Unit; if someone in the city overdoses, we will go with two police officers 72 hours after the overdose to do a condition check on the individual and to give them resources. … Another activity we’ve been engaged in is, whenever we go to a ward, we see if there’s something like a broken sidewalk or a broken electrical pole or a branch of a tree that’s fallen, things like that, and we take a picture of it using the SeeClickFix app, which then goes … to the department responsible for addressing that issue.

How is PHAST better-equipped than the police to handle certain issues?

The Community Response Unit is a good example. When we go to check on a person, we don’t normally allow police officers to do the talking. We’ll ask them to stand back, close enough to provide some security to us, but far enough to give some privacy to that individual, because many people are more interested in talking to us than to the police. … We also have the language skills to communicate with people … and sometimes it’s not just about language, but about culture. If I go to the house of an individual, and we look the same, and we speak the same language, and maybe we’re even from the same country originally, then that individual may be able to trust and open up and communicate with me better.

Featured photo: Biram Saidybah. Courtesy photo.

Colorado author pays tribute to New Hampshire

Colorado author Christina Holbrook discussed her debut novel All the Flowers of the Mountain, which is set in New Hampshire and was inspired, she said, by the times she spent in the Granite State during her childhood.

What is your connection to New Hampshire?

I grew up in New York, and my parents owned a house in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, where we spent all of our summers and winter vacations. Also, my grandparents had farms in New Hampshire. At that time in my life New Hampshire made such a deep impression on me. I felt like my heart was in the White Mountains. I’ve had that feeling through most of my life. As an adult I lived in New York City, and now I’m in Colorado, but I always found a way, especially in the summers, to get back to New Hampshire for a visit. I feel like it’s the home of my imagination.

What is All the Flowers of the Mountain about?

It’s a love story and a coming-of-age story about growing up in New Hampshire. It begins in the present and then moves back to this particular summer when these two main characters meet each other, impact each other’s lives and eventually go their separate ways. It ends in the present again, with the open question as to what will finally happen with this relationship that was so important to these two characters.

What is the significance of New Hampshire in the story?

… The setting is extremely important to the story. It has a big impact on the characters, how they interact with each other and the choices they make and is part of how the story comes together in the end.

What made you want to write this novel at this time in your life?

I’ve been a writer all my life … but I’ve spent my professional life in publishing. … I feel like I’ve always been in sort of a supporting role to other creative people, and I felt like it was finally time for me to put myself in more of a center role as a creative person. … [Another reason was] becoming older. I’m 61 years old now, and in your late 50s and early 60s you start to reflect back on all the things that made you who you are. … New Hampshire is a place that means so much to me in my life. I have a really deep nostalgia for this period of time when I grew up in this particular place, and I really wanted to write about it. … Many of the places that were part of my life back then are included in the story. I’ve described [the book] to my publisher as ‘my love song to New Hampshire.’

What has the writing and publishing process been like?

I started putting the pen to paper on a draft about five years ago. About six months later I had my first draft, and I spent the next year revising it. Then I started to send it out to literary agents to try to get representation. By the beginning of 2020 I had an agent who wanted me to do more revisions … and I ended up rewriting the entire novel. … It took me until this past March to finish that draft. I turned it in to my agent, and she was thrilled because it was such a departure [from] and quite a big improvement on the story. … Also at the end of March, I was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I had surgery in April, and I’ve just finished six weeks of radiation. It’s a pretty serious situation. In the world of publishing, it could easily take my agent six months to a year to find a publisher, and then it could take two more years [to publish it], and at this point, I don’t know if I have two or three years to wait. A local publisher in Colorado came to me and said, ‘We understand your situation. We will get this book out in three months for you.’ They had a team of people do the copy editing, cover design, proofing, everything, and they pulled the whole thing together in three months.

When was the last time you were in New Hampshire, and when will you be back?

The last time I was in New Hampshire was last summer, and we will be going again this summer, probably toward the end of August. I’m working on [scheduling] a book signing there. … I’m really hoping to share this story with people in New Hampshire. Two years ago, during Covid, when there were all these remote writers groups, I also ended up connecting [with] and joining the New Hampshire Writers Project … and started to join them on their monthly Zoom calls.

What would you like people to take away from your book?

I feel like Vermont and Maine get a lot of play but people don’t always know about how incredibly beautiful and magical New Hampshire is. … I hope that, for people who haven’t been to New Hampshire, this book will give them an interest and curiosity to come visit the Granite State. For people who have lived in New Hampshire, I hope it gives them a sense of pleasure to recognize the places and descriptions of New Hampshire.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Museum adds to its view of history

The American Independence Museum in Exeter was recently awarded a grant to increase its exhibition space to share a more comprehensive history of the founding of America. Jennifer Carr, the museum’s curator and collections manager and acting executive director, discussed what that will look like and the importance of inclusive storytelling in American history.

What will the grant be used for?

The Samuel P. Hunt Foundation has generously awarded us $21,250 to enhance our archival and exhibit infrastructure … [with new] archival museum cases, as well as some smaller-ticket items that will help us to tell stories about inclusive history. For the past couple years, the museum has been taking a look at how we interpret the founding of the American nation, and we’ve seen that we tell the story from really one perspective, which is the military perspective. That left a lot of people out of the equation. We’ve been doing research on local and state history and looking at our collections to see how we can bring more inclusive history into what we do with the museum. We’ve discovered that we have a collection of more than 3,000 items, and there are different stories we can tell with those items than what we’ve been telling. There are many different ways for historians to interpret the same item. … With the grant, we’ve been able to purchase five new cases, as well as labels which are ADA-compliant. With that, we can bring more of our collections out of storage and put that research to use, sharing those incredible stories with our guests.

What are some of the stories you plan on telling with the expanded exhibit space?

We’re looking to expand to as many different underrepresented groups as we can. We’ve been working with Black history, women’s history, indigenous history, and we even have one story that covers LGBTQ history. We have a military order book written by General von Steuben, who helped General Washington whip the Continental Army into shape and start winning battles, and it turns out there’s an interesting LGBTQ history related to General von Steuben, so we’re able to bring that book out and talk not only about military strategy but also about the contributions of the LGBTQ community to the founding of our nation. We also have indigenous artifacts uncovered during the 2019 archeological dig at the Ladd-Gilman House … so we’re able to tell the pre-contact history of indigenous peoples right in our own backyard.

When will these updates be ready to view?

The company that manufactures these museum cases actually has a pretty long lead time at this point, so we won’t be able to get them out on exhibit until next season. In the meantime, we’re going to continue working on research to dive deeper into our collections and see how many more stories from different perspectives we can uncover to prepare for getting those museum cases in place to share with our guests in 2023.

Who does this historical research, and what does that process look like?

It’s primarily me. Before I began serving as acting executive director, I was primarily focused on curatorial work. I was taking the lead on all the research and interpretation. We also had a couple fantastic volunteers who helped us with research and going to the historical societies and digging through deeds and archives. It’s been a team effort.

What led the museum to pursue these updates?

It’s something happening industry-wide. I think America has realized so much of its history has gone untold. There’s a reckoning right now with that. We’re looking at everyone who has gone underrepresented in this nation. We feel it’s important to tell a balanced story of the founding of the nation, not just from the military perspective, not just the grand stories of the founding fathers, but of everything the people of this nation went through to gain independence. … Independence wasn’t won only on the battlefield; it was about boycotts women were engaged in to fight the taxes Britain was levying on the colonies; it was about the enslaved people who left their families to go off to fight in a war they believed would lead to freedom for them, only to come home and remain enslaved. There are a lot of stories, good and bad, that led to the founding of this nation.

Has there been an interest from the public in learning about these stories?

Yes. I’ve personally led some tours over the past couple years that included these new stories we’ve uncovered, and I’ve heard people making comments like, ‘Wow, I had no idea that happened here. I’m glad you’re telling these stories, because it’s something I didn’t hear in school.” That has been great to hear. Overwhelmingly, the feedback has been positive. I think people enjoy hearing stories that are different from what they learned in school. We’ve all heard the story of the Boston Tea Party; it’s a great story, but it’s nothing new. I think people are interested in hearing new things and learning on a deeper level.

Featured photo: Jennifer Carr. Courtesy photo.