Healthy Connections Inc.

If Healthy Connections were a for-profit business, its growth would be brag-worthy: from $24,000 and a few volunteers in 1998 to $2 million and 30 employees in 2005.

The growth is still impressive, as is the payroll it pumps into the local economy. Unfortunately, that growth is an indicator of the need for basic medical and dental services that the board of directors has found in Polk, Scott, Sevier and Montgomery counties.

Healthy Connections was founded in 1998 as a home-visiting program for Polk County’s pregnant and parenting teenagers. The first volunteers, including Executive Director Bob Young, quickly found that the struggles facing those young mothers were more than volunteers could provide for.

The scope of the mission was greatly expanded. Using government grants, gifts and a smattering of fees for services, Healthy Connections now operates a medical and dental clinic, staffed by Dr. Lon Sessler and Dr. David Peppers, in Mena that kept 12,000 patient appointments last year. Satellite clinics in De Queen and Mount Ida are in the planning stages.

The organization provides free dental sealants to all second- and sixth-grade students in Polk County each February — a particularly important service since drinking water in the region is not fluoridated.

The program for pregnant teens still makes about 120 home visits per month, but Young said the teenage pregnancy rate that was among the state’s highest in 1998 is now in the bottom half.

“Where it has really borne fruit for us is our [number of] low-birth-weight babies is about a third of what it was. So we’re having fewer babies, but the ones we’re having are much healthier,” he said.

Healthy Connections also operates a court-appointed special advocates program and is working with Southern Good Faith Fund on a program that offers matched savings accounts to low-income families.