Saint Joseph Berea awarded $250,000 grant for Violence Prevention Initiative - Archived

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For More Information:
Katie Heckman, Manager, Community Relations
859.986.6535
[email protected]

Saint Joseph Berea awarded $250,000 grant for Violence Prevention Initiative

Berea, Ky. (August 21, 2015) – Saint Joseph Berea, part of KentuckyOne Health, has been awarded a $254,294 grant to support Green Dot, a bullying intervention program for high school students.

Green Dot will serve the Berea community and also contribute to Catholic Health Initiatives’ systemwide initiative to prevent violence in every community the health care system serves.

The Green Dot Program will help reduce the number of students who report being physically or verbally threatened, attacked or hurt at school. The program will educate the Berea community about bullying and other aggressive acts and give youths in the community the knowledge to identify aggressive acts and the skills to reduce the number of incidents.

“This program will surely help us reduce the amount of bullying that occurs in the Berea community’s schools,” said Katie Heckman, Community Relations Manager at Saint Joseph Berea. “Equipping the youth with the knowledge and skills to reduce the number of these incidents is just the first step.”

The grant is provided by the Mission and Ministry Fund of Catholic Health Initiatives, the national health care system that includes KentuckyOne Health facilities including Saint Joseph Berea.

Since it was established in 1996, with guidance from the health system’s founding congregations, the Mission and Ministry Fund has awarded 452 grants totaling more than $63 million to programs across the globe. The fund was established through contributions from Catholic Health Initiatives’ facilities across the nation.

“As providers of health and health care, we see the human cost of violence every day as victims come to us for emergency services,” said Kevin Lofton, president and chief executive officer of Catholic Health Initiatives. “Violence prevention is a systemwide, long-term commitment for us. With the help of grants from the Mission and Ministry Fund, our local organizations are doing excellent work. They are moving ‘upstream’ to find the places and situations in which violence can be prevented.”

About KentuckyOne Health
KentuckyOne Health, the largest and most comprehensive health system in the Commonwealth, has more than 200 locations including, hospitals, physician groups, clinics, primary care centers, specialty institutes and home health agencies in Kentucky and southern Indiana. KentuckyOne Health is dedicated to bringing wellness, healing and hope to all, including the underserved.  The system is made up of the former Jewish Hospital & St. Mary’s HealthCare and Saint Joseph Health System, along with the University of Louisville Hospital and James Graham Brown Cancer Center. KentuckyOne Health is proud of and strengthened by its Catholic, Jewish and academic heritages.

About Catholic Health Initiatives
Catholic Health Initiatives, a nonprofit, faith-based health system formed in 1996 through the consolidation of four Catholic health systems, expresses its mission each day by creating and nurturing healthy communities in the hundreds of sites across the nation where it provides care. The nation’s second-largest nonprofit health system, Englewood, Colo.-based CHI operates in 19 states and comprises 102 hospitals, including four academic health centers and major teaching hospitals and 30 critical-access facilities; community health-services organizations; accredited nursing colleges; home-health agencies; and other facilities that span the inpatient and outpatient continuum of care. In fiscal year 2014, CHI provided $910 million in charity care and community benefit -- a nearly 20% increase over the previous year -- for programs and services for the poor, free clinics, education and research. Charity care and community benefit totaled more than $1.7 billion with the inclusion of the unpaid costs of Medicare. The health system, which generated revenues of almost $13.9 billion in fiscal year 2014, has total assets of $21.8 billion. Learn more at www.catholichealthinitiatives.org.