We had an IMPACT on Monday night: Thanks!

Photo by The Daily Progress

More than 1,500 people representing 32 congregations jammed into the John Paul Jones Arena on Monday evening to show our support for IMPACT and the two proposals we are backing that could make life a little easier for the neediest in our community.

The official count for St. Paul's Memorial Church was 141 -- our highest ever. And we had the second largest turn-out, with the Church of the Incarnation was first.

The Daily Progress has a good story about our "Nehemiah Action" Monday evening, and the proposals, which you can read by clicking HERE.

I especially want to thank John Frazee and all the volunteers who labored so hard the last few weeks.

We won a major victory with commitments from the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and the Charlottesville City Council to fund a program for mental health transitional care for people getting out of jail and prison.

But we were unable to get commitments from decision makers with local hospitals and vocational educators for a proposal for a collaborative health care employment training program that would require an unprecedented degree of cooperation between hospitals and schools, both private non-profit and public entities.

We aren't done. We learned a few things.

We have learned that the proposed health care training collaborative proposal is the most complex project we have taken on in the six years of IMPACT. We have learned that this is going to take more than one year to achieve because there are multiple layers of decision makers. We have learned that it will take small steps, and our proposal is really only a small step in solving a larger problem.

And we have learned that it is crucial that the decision makers are present with us and that the public’s business is conducted in public. In the last few weeks these decision makers expressed support for this proposal in meetings with our research team. Yet, for some reason, they could not express their support with us publicly. So we have learned that we have a ways to go.

Finally, the news coverage from Channel 19 was also quite good. These television news reports tend to be taken off the web relatively soon, so have a look: