Healthy New River Valley: Empowering Young People To Tackle Significant Community Issues

Podcast Interview with Holly Lesko and Several Healthy New River Valley Participants In this episode, Holly Lesko introduces the Healthy NRV project and facilitates a conversation with four high school students about what they have learned about community health and digital storytelling through the project. Healthy NRV was a unique community-based participatory research program focused on assessing the impacts of health factors on community development and engaging youth in local communities in community health conversations. The students involved engaged with a number of issues and brainstormed several creative community engagement processes. Holly Lesko has worked with communities and organizations in the New River Valley region and across the Commonwealth for the past 30+ years in the areas of comprehensive planning, leadership development, economic development and enhancement, educational training and curriculum development, public health assessment and program delivery, grant writing, facilitation, assessment, and evaluation as well as grassroots community organizing. Her focus in community development is on long-range goal development with community health assessment evaluation tools to create new ways of viewing and approaching issues and concepts through inclusive and diverse community engagement. In previous work at Virginia Tech, she served as the Principal Investigator for the Healthy NRV project in partnership with the NRVRC with Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funding.