Historical PHIERS Work
Camp Fit Community Health Fair
Community outreach designed to connect families with practical health and support resources while bringing schools, health providers, community organizations, and families together.
Why PHIERS?
A national problem requires a model built for national reach.
Children experience one life. Our systems too often respond in separate pieces.
More than a decade ago, PHIERS focused on school-aged children—bringing health, education, families, schools, mentors, community organizations, and public resources together around their needs. That connects directly with MAP's work today: helping young people grow, supporting families, and bringing responsible adults into their lives.
The capacity was lost. The model wasn't.
Historical PHIERS Work
The Camp Fit Challenge
A whole-child model connecting health, physical activity, mentoring, enrichment, families, schools, and community organizations.
This was more than an event.
There was an architecture behind it.
Independent Public Validation
Others saw what was being built.
Their remarks document that PHIERS' work was visible to public leaders at the time.
Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown on the Back-to-School Health Fair
Brown thanked PHIERS and its partners for coordinating the event with Prince George’s County Public Schools and highlighted the importance of health, nutrition, wellness, education, and community partnership.
“Through coordinated events like the back to school health fair and by working together we’ll build a better future for all of our children.”
Rep. Chris Van Hollen on PHIERS and the Health Fair
Van Hollen thanked PHIERS and its partners for making the back-to-school health fair possible and connected the work directly to children’s health, academic success, nutrition, fitness, and healthy choices.
“It’s vitally important to remember that good physical health is an important element of academic success.”
Their words matter because they document what PHIERS was already trying to build.
School Nurses Were Part of the Model
The national vision was already taking shape.
School nurses bring clinical expertise into the school community. They can help identify health conditions and other barriers affecting learning, connect families with appropriate services, coordinate with educators and healthcare providers, and help the people surrounding a child see needs that might otherwise remain disconnected.
That is why school nursing was never an accessory to PHIERS' whole-child vision. It was part of the architecture.
In 2012, PHIERS worked with school nurses and negotiated with the national leadership of the National Association of School Nurses (NASN), with their blessing, on a school-nurse-led approach to health reform addressing the whole child: mind, body, and spirit. Maryland-based nurses helped create the presentation below because that is where PHIERS founder Will Price lived at the time.
Their work with PHIERS helped articulate a school-nurse-led approach to national health reform — using schools as trusted community access points and connecting clinical expertise with education, families, healthcare providers, community organizations, mentors, and services.
The objective extended far beyond putting another health program inside a school.
The objective was a model capable of rebuilding school-health and whole-child capacity across communities nationwide.
One child. One life. One coordinated response.
School Health + Whole-Child Architecture
A model for rebuilding school-health capacity.
Schools can become trusted community access points — connecting students and families to health, support, services, and the organizations already working to help them.
The vision was national then. It remains national now.
Historical context: This presentation documents PHIERS' earlier collaboration with school-nursing leaders and the national scope of the model being developed at that time. It is presented as evidence of that work, not as a claim of current organizational or individual endorsement.
Documented Architecture
The plans asked the same question we ask now: what changed?
01School-based healthPHIERS developed school-based approaches built around coordinated health and social support, including school nurses and frontline partners.
02Whole-child supportThe early model connected health, education, mentoring, enrichment, families, faith communities, nonprofits, and local resources.
03Measure what changedThe plans asked what matters: Did attendance improve? Health? Grades? Did families get better support? The objective was not simply to provide services. It was to determine whether those services produced results.
04Community coordinationPHIERS was built to bring schools, health providers, community organizations, mentors, families, and other resources together around the needs of children — instead of leaving everyone to work in separate lanes.
So What Happened?
The need didn't disappear. The funding did.
PHIERS' earlier school-health work depended on funding capable of supporting school-nursing and coordinated community-health capacity.
That capacity became increasingly difficult to sustain.
PHIERS did not stop believing that health, education, family circumstances, and community conditions were connected. We lost the financial pathway needed to implement the model at scale.
And that exposed a larger weakness.
A system this important cannot depend on one organization, one grant, one funding stream, or one program operating by itself.
The Lesson
Build something harder to dismantle.
Connect the people.
Connect the organizations.
Connect the resources.
Build the workforce.
Establish public accountability.
Start with what the people themselves say they need.
This Time, the People Help Create the Mandate
That changes the equation.
PHIERS does not begin by deciding what a community should want.
We ask.
The survey documents what people say matters.
The petition demonstrates how many people are willing to stand behind those priorities.
Together, they can transform scattered individual concerns into something much more consequential.
The Result
A documented public mandate.
Now the conversation changes.
What needs to be protected?
What needs to be restored?
What needs to be built?
Where should public resources go?
What results should those investments produce?
And once commitments are made: Did they do what they said they would do?
Here Is the Machinery
Community voice becomes organized capacity.
MAP
MAP organizes.
Men Accountable Project brings people into the work through participation, leadership, service, relationships, and responsibility.
MAP organizes people around outcomes that matter.
PAM
The PAM drives accountability.
What was promised?
What was funded?
Where did the money actually go?
What was implemented?
What results were achieved?
The PAM tracks results, requires answers, and records refusals.
PHIERS
PHIERS connects and builds.
PHIERS connects the documented mandate to the people, organizations, expertise, services, workforce, resources, technology, and infrastructure capable of responding.
MAP organizes. The PAM drives accountability. PHIERS connects and builds.
And the people establish the priorities.
A Safety Net for the Safety Net
America does not lack people trying to help.
Schools
School nurses
Teachers
Healthcare providers
Mentors
Tutors
Community organizations
Faith communities
Workforce organizations
Public agencies
Volunteers
Families
The problem is that too many of those resources are underfunded, disconnected, difficult to navigate, or operating in separate lanes.
PHIERS is designed to connect them.
A school or another trusted community location can become an access point rather than another silo.
A family should not have to understand a maze of organizations and government programs before it can get help.
And organizations should not have to surrender their missions or identities to participate.
Bring what you already do well.
Connect it to documented needs.
Coordinate the response.
Measure what happens.
That is the safety net for the safety net.
Mind. Body. Spirit. Child. Family. Community.
This Time, We Can Also Build the Workforce
A national model requires people capable of delivering it.
Coordination alone is not enough. Communities need people.
Mentors
Tutors
Community health and support workers
Resource navigators
Caregivers
People helping families connect to services
People strengthening organizations already doing the work
That is why AmeriCorps matters to the national PHIERS strategy.
AmeriCorps offers a potential federal pathway for helping fund and build service capacity around documented community needs.
It does not replace school nurses, teachers, healthcare professionals, or existing community organizations.
It can help put additional human capacity around them.
Community-defined priorities connected to an organized service workforce capable of helping deliver results.
The Model Is Whole-Child by Design
Because the problems are connected.
Literacy matters.
So does whether the child can see the page.
Tutoring matters.
So does whether the child is hungry.
Attendance matters.
So does whether transportation, housing, health, or family circumstances are keeping the child away.
Mentoring matters.
So does whether that mentor can connect a family to additional help when the problem extends beyond mentoring.
We do not have to choose between improving education and addressing the conditions affecting education. The whole-child model does both.
Start with the priority.
Assess the conditions surrounding it.
Bring the right people together.
Coordinate the response.
Measure whether anything changed.
Sacramento Is the Genesis. Nationwide Impact Is the Goal.
We do not need to wait to begin.
Sacramento gives us an opportunity to assemble and demonstrate the modern architecture now — while the same model is built for national use.
Participating education partners bring education knowledge and experience. Community partners bring trust, relationships, expertise, and reach. MAP organizes participation. The PAM drives follow-through and keeps the public record. PHIERS connects the mandate to the larger whole-child and community-support architecture.
And the people establish the priorities.
Community Voice
↓
Documented Mandate
↓
Organized Participation
↓
Coordinated Solutions
↓
Workforce + Resources
↓
Public Accountability
↓
Measurable Outcomes
Sacramento is where we can demonstrate how these pieces work together in the current environment. It is not a reason to wait before organizing elsewhere.
But the problem is not unique to Sacramento. And neither is the solution.
The same architecture can serve different communities without telling those communities what their priorities must be.
One community may prioritize literacy. Another may prioritize school health. Another may identify mentoring, attendance, hunger, family support, workforce development, or another urgent need.
The architecture remains the same. The people determine the mandate.
From One Community to National Leverage
Local priorities do not have to remain local pleas.
As communities document their priorities and organize support around them, those mandates can travel upward.
School boardsDistrictsCitiesCountiesStatesFederal agenciesCongress
The objective is not to manufacture one national list of demands.
It is to give communities a common infrastructure for establishing their own demands — and combining their leverage where those demands intersect.
Before elected officials ask people for their support, people should be able to state clearly what they expect from those seeking it.
Before public money disappears into systems, communities should be able to ask where it went.
And after promises are made, there should be a record of what happened.
That is how community voice becomes constituency power.
We Have Already Waited
The next step is implementation.
We do not need another decade to discover that children's health affects learning.
We do not need another decade to discover that families struggle when services are fragmented.
We do not need another decade to discover that trusted community organizations know how to reach people institutions often cannot.
And we do not need another decade to discover that communities need a meaningful voice in decisions about the resources intended to serve them.
The evidence gives us a foundation.
The mandate gives us direction.
The workforce gives us capacity.
Accountability tells us whether we delivered.
THE CAPACITY WAS LOST.
THE MODEL WASN'T.
This time, the people help create the mandate.
This time, we build the capacity around it.
Sacramento is the genesis. Nationwide impact is the goal.
About PHIERS' earlier work+
Historical PHIERS materials document earlier school-health, community-support, Camp Fit, school-nursing, and coordinated-care work.
They are presented as a record of the direction and work pursued at the time, not as a claim that every past partnership remains active today.
You should not have to take our word for what PHIERS says it wants to build now. You can see what we were already working to build then.