The Mississippi Delta is a vast, open land with mostly rural towns and its residents spread out from north, south, east and west.
For two days in mid July, those separate factions come together in Clarksdale to brainstorm, form relationships and share ideas to improve life in the Delta.
This year was no different as the Coahoma Community College Higher Education Center played host to the Delta Regional Forum held Thursday and Friday. This year’s panel was titled, “Population Health, Development, and Entrepreneurial Problem Solving.”
The conference, which was the fifth one, had been held biannually until the organizers agreed last year to make it an annual event since there was such a great need and interest, said Dr. John Green, one of the organizers.
“We decided to have a sort of ground zero event here in Clarksdale because there’s so many different groups doing this kind of work,” said Green, who is a professor and the director of the Center for Population Studies at the University of Mississippi.
“Even though we come from all over the state, we see Clarksdale as sort of symbolically a hotbed for this kind of work,” Green said.
Participation in the forum has grown from about 35 in its initial year to the 76 attendees present this year.
The bringing together of ideas was a similar theme expressed in several workshops and panel discussions during the two-day forum.
“We have a lot of resources in the Delta, but we’re not good at connecting the dots and working together,” said Valeria Hawkins, a leader in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health.
She was taking part in a panel Thursday afternoon entitled “Healthy Students for a Healthy Tomorrow: Promoting Physical and Mental Well-Being in Schools.”
Danai Winters, who will be a senior at Clarksdale High School this fall, was one of the panel participants. She talked of challenges that she and her classmates face as far as school safety, social media and cyber bullying. One of the positive things she is finding are strong student-teacher relationships.
“We’re finding more and more teachers who actually care about your success and want you to be successful,” Winters said.
Still, she said it is up to students to “be more positive and considerate of others’ feelings” and take it upon themselves to find those resources that are available and said, “You have to be willing to step out of your comfort zone.”
It’s Winters’ hope that a “whole school, whole child, whole community” approach takes place where schools become community havens and a safe place for children and teachers have the tools to do their jobs.
“That this becomes the norm for all schools.. that’s my hope, that’s my vision,” Winters said.
