Dollar Goes Long Way

A family guidance center in Southern California worked out a deal with one of the Medicaid managed care organizations here a couple of years ago where it got $1.20 every month for every kid it helped to avoid an adverse event and another 75 cents every month for every kid it screened for diabetes. You see, there was a problem in this community with troubled youth, broken homes run by parents struggling to break poverty’s cycle, some dealing with addiction, some working two jobs leaving kids to raise themselves, eating unhealthy, sugary foods. The center took this money, around $2,300 over the year, and it put in one of those river rock climbing walls. They hired one of the kid’s dads, PaDah, to build it, paying him $750 out of the $2,300. Pa Dah makes minimum wage at a factory in town but “I used to build homes out of bamboo in Thailand,” he said, before he moved his family to California to flee from violence in Myanmar. That rock wall is now a source of hope for the kids and the community, and points to just how far even a dollar can go sometimes, if used for good.