Special Board of Aldermen Meeting Page 2
March 21, 2016
This might be a hard slide to see. This breaks down our interest as a United Way was in health. So, in terms
of health you look at how long a person lives and how healthy a person’s lifespan feels. Of all the things that
contribute to a person’s long-term health outcomes, their social factors are 40% of that. So not your DNA, not
your access to healthcare but how well you live and where you live and how you feel about how you live.
That’s why we chose to focus on social inclusion in integration. The Endowment for Health was very broad
and allowed each community to define what their term for immigrant was. We felt that people could be living in
our community and not feel connected to us for three weeks or three generations and still not feel connected to
the community. We painted the term immigrant as broadly as possible and that’s where we came up with the
notion of a One Greater Nashua; a feeling that our community is strongest when all people have the
opportunity to participate at their full potential.
Mr. Jared Barbosa, Co-Chair, One Greater Nashua Coalition
I’d like to start this aspect of the presentation with a quote. “Nashua’s legacy as a community of innovation,
advancement, experimentation, invention, enterprise, diversity, culture, tradition and youth stands as strong as
granite, as powerful as our rivers and as eternal as our land. The Gate City will go forward and continue to
make history.” This quote really sets the tone for what OGN is all about and aspires to be. It is our mission,
our goal, to improve healthy equity through social integration and social inclusion. Hence our motto “Stronger
Together.” After many weeks of meetings we reconvened as a coalition to develop a well thought out plan, a
plan that includes opportunities in economic vitality, community engagement and leadership. We strongly
believe that opening these doors will lead to improved overall health. We value our growing diversity and I'd
like you to remember that for the next slide. This slide shows a map of Greater Nashua; the blue & yellow
indicate sections that are the highest concentration of our non-white adult population and here is a
concentration of our non-white youth population and red being the highest concentration. The reality is
diversity is growing. In ten years that’s our workforce. We feel it is important to value this growing population
and we believe that our plan truly invests in it. We have a three pronged approach to our three year plan to
fundamentally change the way Nashua makes decisions. We knew it wouldn’t work if we tried to reinvent the
wheel so we built a bigger table. Building a stronger cohesion between stakeholders and ultimately creating
stronger feelings of belonging among all residents. Each pathway has its own focused goal group anchored by
existing institutions in the community. Specific measured goals and objectives; each goal group connects
through others through the goal. Goals are interconnected and complimentary. |’ll explain a little bit about
each goal. Gateways and cultural navigators help newcomers with skills that they need to succeed. Business
and civic engagement attract young people to our community and encourage civic leadership and engagement
and youth leadership.
Ms. Janet Orozco
One of the things that mainly highlight with the youth goal group is that we as a community emphasize on
middle schools. We learned that some of the neighborhoods are very different and unique so when the middle
meet for the first time coming from the twelve elementary schools it’s a different dynamic of how kids associate
with each other and how parents interact with other. We also learned that perhaps if we come up with a
system or build up in the culture of the middle school that are in our communities; how do we make it more of
developing academics of success, opportunity of engagement for the parents and the youth and kind of build
up what is in their schools already. When we approached the administrators of the schools we also offered the
opportunity of enriching their curriculum in the sense of when we could provide cultural effectiveness training in
the sense of what are the faculty learning that we could build that from and also have a more global
understanding of what the community sees as a community because it’s easier....1 can say that being a
minority Latina in my neighborhood, | find ways that | can highlight what my district is about but also bring in
what | have. We wanted to allow that opportunity for the teachers to understand what the parents have to
bring and how they could bring it in a more effective way where everyone understands each other. We could
highlight projects that the school per se wants to do. One of the things that we were invited to do was to
become part of the summer program, the ELLO Summer Program so we came in with a very open mind and
understanding that the school already has a curriculum for that but we built up on leadership so we worked
