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HRDC holds event to improve assistance in the community

District 4 Human Resources Development Council held a brown-bag lunch event Friday to meet with community partners and community members to discuss and share information on what services are available in the area.

HRDC is a private non-profit community action agency that has been serving Hill, Blaine and Liberty counties, including Rocky Boy’s and Fort Belknap Indian reservations, since 1965.

HRDC Energy Program Director Teresa Wynia, one of the organizers for the event, said HRDC wanted to hold this event because they share many of the same clients with their community partners and wanted to

collaborate and educate employees, other agencies and their clients on what is available. She added that if there is a service that they cannot provide at HRDC there may be another agency that has that service available and it is important to educate everyone about the resources available.

When HRDC gets new staff, Wynia said, it is important that they stay current with what is available and what the needs are in the community.

HRDC Fiscal Officer Kathy Terbovitz said that a total of nine people attended this first event including personnel from Family Connections and one of its clients.

She said this was the first one of these events that the HRDC held in the past year and that she hopes it will develop and grow over time, adding that she hopes in the future they will be able to have this event quarterly.

Terbovitz said that this event is open to the entire area District 4 HRDC serves.

“It is important that we can, as a community, work together in gathering knowledge, knowledge is power,” she said.

“It is very difficult to ask for help, for some individuals,” Wynia said, “and to be able to know which way to turn, we want to be able to help them with that.”

Terbovitz said it is really important that people know they can come to HRDC even if they are not low income. With the government shut down, she said, there are many things that HRDC can do that is not income driven or eligibility driven.

She added that HRDC helps thousands of individuals within the community and with these events they will be able to further explore how to better assist individuals and families and how the structure of all the

different programs can work together.

In the first event, she said, they were really able to work in house, collectively building an understanding of how different programs and agencies work.

“We know the help is there, but how do we get people to that,” Terbovitz said.

 

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