CALAIS, Maine — When Emma Polk was born, she was 15 weeks premature and weighed only 1 pound, 15 ounces.
Not long after her birth, Emma, now 5, of Calais, developed a staph infection that affected her toes, hip joint and knee socket, her mother, Toni Polk, said. Then in the spring of 2014, Emma’s right leg had to be amputated above the knee.
Polk and her husband, Christopher, can’t count the number of hospitalizations and doctor visits their daughter has had.
“She has been through more in five years than I have been in my lifetime,” Toni Polk said. The couple struggled to make ends meet with all the medical and related expenses, even with Christopher working several part-time jobs.
Enter the Community Caring Collaborative, or CCC, an organization unique to Washington County, co-director Charley Martin-Berry said.
The Machias-based CCC, founded in 2007, was designed to serve the most vulnerable — infants and young children — in Washington County. But CCC organizers quickly realized they could not treat infants and young children without treating the entire family, CCC co-director Marjorie Withers said.
She described the CCC as “a grass-roots organization that came together to really find ways to support and create services and other ways of improving lives.”
People who need services often “have a hard time trying to organize what they need,” she said. The work of the CCC is making it easier for families to access health, financial and educational services.
In other words, the CCC and its roughly 44 partner organizations work together to find ways to treat the entire set of needs families might be dealing with — from poverty to education to health and development — instead of requiring each need to be addressed by a different agency, she said.
The Polks took advantage of the Bridging program, aimed at helping families with young children and infants who have conditions that often require hospitalization.
“We don’t call it case management because it’s much more than case management,” said Bridging nurse Judy Donaher, who works for the Washington Hancock Community Agency, one of the CCC’s partners. “But there’s an element of case management to it.”
Essentially, Bridging is designed to help families solve problems related to those caused by the hospitalization. For example, the Polks used the program to coordinate the many types of therapies Emma required after her surgeries.
The program also provided gas cards to help the Polks with the costs of transporting Emma and visiting her while she was in the hospital. The family also received vouchers for hospital cafeteria food and assistance with making and paying for hotel reservations during their daughter’s hospital stays.
Then, the week before Thanksgiving last year, during one of their many trips to see a doctor in Massachusetts, the family’s Chevy Equinox broke down.
“We started driving home and the car started overheating,” Toni Polk said.
It finally stopped running near Clifton.
A nephew towed them home. Mechanics then gave the Polks the bad news: The car needed a new motor, which came with a $4,700 price tag.
Without a vehicle, they could not bring Emma to her many medical appointments.
Donaher, who was their bridging nurse, told the Polks about the Hope Fund, another CCC partner, which is designed to provide one-time gifts to help families become more self-sufficient.
The Hope Fund paid $2,000 toward the Polks’ vehicle repair. The family received $1,000 from the dealer because the vehicle was only barely out of warranty. They were able to roll the remaining $1,700 needed for a new motor into their auto loan, they said.
“We got our car back Christmas Eve. That was the best Christmas present ever,” said Toni Polk, whose parents had been providing them with transportation.
The CCC doesn’t actually work directly with the families — the partner agencies do. For example, Donaher works for Washington Hancock Community Agency, not for CCC.
The CCC merely coordinates planning sessions to help determine which agencies can help in various circumstances. The collaborative also helps to create programs and even funding for new programs before turning them over to the partner agencies.
“If we really do our jobs well, we’re really invisible,” Withers said. “The service providers are the staffs of our partner agencies.”
Coming up with ideas for solutions to problems and then implementing them begins with an annual “vision day,” in which the CCC’s five employees and representatives of all the partner agencies “envision the Washington County you want,” Martin-Berry said.
The invitation to vision day also is extended to community members and others interested in the future of Washington County, she said.
In addition to the vision day, the CCC and its partners meet monthly in subgroups, including “the workgroup,” for front-line workers serving individuals and families; the “CCC council,” for agency and program directors who set policy in their organizations; and the “state agency partnership,” which includes state program directors and other statewide policy and advocacy professionals who can remove barriers and support initiatives, she said.
Two groups, Poverty Busters and the Poverty Core, also meet each month to address issues related to poverty. A third group, the Neighbor Group, meets biweekly.
Among the CCC’s successes is the Family Futures Downeast program, which last month was named by the Obama administration as one of 10 Rural Impact Demonstration sites in the country. As part of that announcement, the program also was awarded $100,000 in funding from the Portland-based John T. Gorman Foundation.
Family Futures Downeast is designed to break the cycle of generational poverty by helping parents and children. Parents take 15 credits at either the University of Maine at Machias or Washington County Community College — both of whom are CCC partners — while children are enrolled in early education programs.
The Polks are grateful for the help the Community Caring Collaborative has provided them.
“They helped us out a lot,” Toni Polk said of the programs. “Any time I needed anything, [Donaher] was just a phone call away.”