As we welcome 2023, on behalf of Health Outreach Partners Board of Directors and staff, I want to wish all our partners, collaborators, friends, and supporters a Happy New Year. I am looking forward to a year where we get to see each other more and share ideas, innovations, and friendships in person.

HOP Staff at our Holiday Party, January 2023 

Our team successfully transitioned to a hybrid work model about mid-year 2022. While this wasn’t seamless and had several starts and restarts, we committed to finding ways to build meaningful relationships with each other in a slow and safe way. We started with a weekly outdoor huddle over coffee and worked our way to in-person planning and strategy sessions, and now we have our monthly staff meetings in the office together collaborating in anticipation of a busy year ahead. It feels so good to be in the office having organic discussions and solve problems with a quick conversation in the lunch room.  I took those moments for granted in the years before the pandemic. Now, when chatting with my co-workers I appreciate them and the time we spend together with renewed gratitude for these simple yet meaningful moments.

We also began traveling again last year. HOP staff attended four conferences, presenting workshops and reacquainting with and meeting new partners. In March, I traveled to Austin, TX with my co-worker Liam Spurgeon (recently promoted to Program Director-woot woot) to attend the Midwest Stream Forum for Agricultural Worker Health. Liam and I presented a workshop on our Organizational Self-Care program, and I honestly felt in that moment that the best self-care ever was being there at the Stream Forum with our extended family of coworkers. This year, the whole team is excited and looks forward to resuming our travel schedule. Our team plans to be at all three Stream Forums as well as the National Conference for Agricultural Worker Health, in Seattle, WA in May. We hope to see many of our NTTAP partners, and health centers friends in the months ahead.

As 2023 kicks off, I am so excited to announce our newly designed website! This was a long time in the planning! Liam led the project, with help from our summer intern, Camille Cline, and the wonderful web design team at New Moon Creative LLC. Please take a moment to check us out and drop us a line letting us know what you think. Our newest exciting addition, the Inclusion Scorecard for Population Health™, has its own page with information on our latest resource – please take a look.

Lastly, just as 2023 got started the HOP team celebrated the holidays with a New Year dinner in San Francisco. It was another moment that 3 years ago we would have taken for granted, but in 2023 it was a re-commitment to our relationship as team mates and a celebration of hope in the year to come, plus delicious food! I am so lucky to work with this team and do this important work. With gratitude and hope for the new year.

With gratitude – Cindy