Jennifer Green: Health of a community starts with connection
As a pediatrician, I spend my days sitting with families who are doing their best to raise healthy, happy children.
When they reach the age of 3, I begin asking parents about their daily physical activity and peer connections. Almost every time, I hear the same longing: “We’d love to get them into swim lessons… or gymnastics… or something, but there just aren’t enough spots.” And they’re right.
McMinnville has always cared about its people. We’ve built an aquatic center, a community center, a senior center, a library and many parks and trails. But most of these spaces were created in the 1980s, when our population was less than half of what it is today.
- Community Center: Opened in 1924 as armory, repurposed in 1981.
- Aquatic Center: Opened in 1956, renovated in 1986.
- Library: Opened in 1912, most recently expanded in 1982.
- Population in 1980: 14,080
- Population in 2024: 35,255
We’ve grown. Our needs have grown. But our spaces haven’t kept up. As a result, our community is failing citizens who need ways to connect and stay healthy.
In this year’s Nov. 4 general election, you will have the opportunity to help McMinnville thrive by helping you, your family and your neighbors stay healthy by helping pass a Parks and Recreation bond to fund new and improved facilities. Ballots started going out this week.
This bond is about so much more than buildings. It’s about who we want to be as a community. It will improve access to some amazing programs we already have and expand capacity for the future.
Do we want to raise children who feel supported? Who have safe places to play and grow? Who know they belong here? Who read books and meet with friends? Do we want to give them inviting areas to study and socialize that are designed with their age in mind?
I have so many families in my practice where the parents feel isolated.
As a mother of three young children myself, I know how hard it is to find places to go with my children when it is raining outside or too hot for the park. How nice would it be to have a bright and inviting space to meet other families and let our children play together.
This bond also will update our senior center.
There have been several studies looking at longevity. Overall, the research consistently shows that strong social connections are linked to longer lifespans, slower cognitive decline and greater overall quality of life.
By updating our senior center, we will create spaces to encourage socialization and community involvement.
As a doctor, I was trained to treat illness by finding the root cause. While we can continue to address mental health concerns formed from isolation, having inviting spaces to interact with our community is both preventative and curative.
We talk a lot about wellness these days. The global wellness industry was valued at $6 trillion in 2023, and it’s projected to exceed $9 trillion by 2028.
But real wellness doesn’t start with supplements or fad diets. It starts with connection, access, and belonging.
Public health experts refer to these as the five social determinants of health:
- Education access and quality
- Health care and quality
- Neighborhood and built environment
- Social and community context
- Economic stability
Our local parks and recreation system touches all of these. And when we invest in it, we invest in prevention — in physical health, mental health and long-term stability for our town.
We can either keep patching the symptoms or we can build solutions. We can keep asking families to “try again next season” or we can expand capacity. We can leave aging infrastructure as is or we can reimagine what it could be.
Let’s choose to build the kind of McMinnville where from toddler to retiree, we all know we matter and have a place to belong — starting as toddlers running around while our parents socialize, through our teenage years meeting up to work on a group project, to our senior years, staying connected with friends over enjoyable activities. This parks and recreation bond represents a giant step toward prioritizing health for McMinnville.
Please join me in voting yes. It’s our chance to say yes — to our kids, to our parents and to the future of our community.
Dr. Jennifer Green is a board-certified pediatrician practicing at the Physicians Medical Center.
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