McKenzie Valley Wellness – Annual Report

August 30, 2022

Overview / President’s Message 

The catastrophic Holiday Farm Fire divided McKenzie Valley history and our personal life stories into “before the fire” and “after the fire.” 

We found that rebuilding a whole community is incredibly hard and takes longer than most of us imagined at the start. Somehow it takes a lot of meetings and forms. 

We learned that we can do this. We were tough enough to survive the fire. We are resilient enough and brave enough to rebuild. We will honor what we had before and include those legacies as we build something new. 

Highlights of the past year for McKenzie Valley Wellness include: 

In June, 2021, the State of Oregon’s Fire Relief Act provided funding of $1.8 million to McKenzie Valley Wellness to rebuild the Clinic. Lane County Commissioner Heather Buch, State Senator Floyd Prozanski, and Lane County’s Alex Cuyler played critical roles in getting that funding. Many people in our community helped make calls to get that funding. I am grateful to everyone who helped get that across the finish line. We welcome the state investment in our community. It’s long overdue. 

We prepared a Request For Proposal for architectural services. Our board selected Pivot Architecture, in Eugene. We’ve worked with them through the programmatic phase and we’re pretty far along in the schematic phase. 

We will build a new, larger clinic and wellness building on the Clinic’s original site in Blue River. 

We refunded the $2,500 Oregon Humanities grant. The plan was a neat program to bring some members of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra to the school and community for two days of music and healing events. First the delta surge of Covid-19 hit, then the omicron surge. We kept postponing it, and finally we refunded the grant. 

We overhauled our Conflict of Interest policies and we are nearly done overhauling our Finance Policies. Updating our bylaws is in our work plan for this year. 

Along with new buildings, we need to build bridges. We have so much work to do to rebuild this community. We don’t have to agree on everything-we live up here because we’re strong, independent people. Let’s figure out how to help each other. 

Our vision is that in five years, the McKenzie Valley region is sustainably renewed and rebuilt as a lively, robust community that is a destination-not just as a place to visit, but as a place to live. 

Will you help us achieve that goal? We can’t do it alone! 

Valerie Rapp 

President, Board of Directors, McKenzie Valley Wellness