The Prairie Five Meals program of Prairie Five Community Action Council, Inc. has been awarded a community impact grant from the United Way of Southwest Minnesota (UWSWMN) of $8,000. These funds will help offset the cost of providing meals to the older adult population thereby promoting healthy and independent living through improved nutrition and reduced social isolation. This work aligns with UWSWMN’s hunger priority area.

Communities throughout the local area have been working for the past months to plan a variety of events for families and adults to enjoy for the Halloween Season. The newspaper has compiled a list of all events to make planning for the spooky season holiday even easier.

Pioneer PBS’s producer of Compass Amanda Anderson was approached by Dr. Tom Birkey, and his wife Doris along with the Montevideo Area Memory Loss Network (MAMLN) with the idea to produce a program about the Birkeys’ experiences with Alzheimer’s disease some time ago. Right away, Anderson knew that the idea fit in perfectly with the type of programming Compass has been striving to achieve, utilizing solutions journalism for story- telling. Thus began an effort over the summer to film and edit “Birkey’s Brain”, a program that premiered for the first time last week at the Montevideo Millennium Theater, which donated the space for the event, in partnership with MAMLN and Pioneer PBS. “It was really conceived from Dr. Birkey. He wanted to create a space where people were having positive conversations about Alzheimer’s Disease and living well with Dementia,” Anderson says.