E. Wenatchee Nonprofit Gets Creative with Leftover COVID Supplies

Action Health Partners (AHP), a nonprofit in East Wenatchee, is putting to creative use the remaining vestiges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The most transformative public health crisis of many of our lifetimes is now years in the rearview, but it continues to cast an outsized shadow over AHP. It wasn't long ago that row after row of teeming pallets sat unused. These were care kits - food, health supplies and personal hygiene essentials - left over from the dog days of the pandemic. Some of the items had long since expired and therefore couldn't be donated.

So what AHP do? The nonprofit enlisted its partner organizations - Serve Wenatchee Valley, HopeSource and the Chelan Douglas Community Action Council, to name a few - to refashion and repackage the kits, jettisoning those overaged perishables.

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This is being done at an Eagle Transfer warehouse in Wenatchee. Recently volunteers were observed opening boxes, disposing of expired goods and repurposing the boxes into something practically useful for community members in need.

Way before COVID-19 sank its fangs into humankind, AHP was doing good work on behalf of the sick and under-resourced.

The nonprofit is 25 years old and has an equal number of partners in the region, including four in Chelan County alone. Its service networks include community care coordination, health education and insurance. Each network serves in its own way to advance the nonprofit's broader mission of "educating, supporting and empowering individuals to improve quality of life and well-being through community support services," according to its website.

The care kits were an innovation of the Washington Department of Health, which used the North Central Washington Social Hub as a conduit for distribution.