 Krowing County and Bridges of Hope have partnered together to try and bring great change to the Brainerd Lakes area. Our reporter Anthony Scott has the story. Krowing County is facing their health and social issues within their neighborhoods head on by building a self-healing community. Krowing County has been trying for a really long time to solve a lot of social issues related to child protection, substance abuse, mental health and we know that we can't do it all on our own. So the county reached out to Bridges of Hope and together they came up with a self-healing community model. This model really started in the state of Washington in several counties in Washington in the 1990s and based on that the the communities there started to see some amazing outcomes for health. The model forces conversations to happen between people to really find out what is going on in the communities. This model actually gets into the community to ask the community what it is that they need as opposed to us coming in telling them what they need. I'm spending a lot of time having conversations with people who are working in the community and people who live in the community. The project will start in the communities of northeast Brainerd near Garfield and Lowell Elementary but the plan is to eventually expand to all of Krowing County. Once we're accomplishing some outcomes in that area we're going to move to Crosby because that was another area identified as having that high concentration of those types of issues. The county used a geographic information system also known as GIS mapping to decide what neighborhoods to implement the self-healing community. Now it's time to find the issues and come up with solutions. What can we do practically that's going to really help people and help them sooner than later. The self-healing community model will try to build stronger relationships within Krowing County and as a result we'll see great outcomes but the change will not happen overnight. But the really important stuff the outcomes or the actual impacts on the community a reduction in child protection, a reduction on suicide rates, an increase in school attendance those are going to take a while. We're thinking at least five years if not ten. The project is still at the beginning stages of talking to community members and finding out what issues people are really dealing with. But Krowing County hopes to see vast improvements within the community in the next several years. Reporting from Brainerd, Anthony Scott, Lakeland News. To learn more information on the self-healing community check you can check out this story on our website at lptv.org slash news. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.