By John O’Brien

Redstone Review

LYONS – Happy New Year. This is a second article in a series introducing the members of the Lyons Economic Gardening Group, LEGG. As a committee of the Lyons Area Chamber of Commerce, LEGG offers information and resources to local businesses. The intent of economic gardening, which is a global movement, is to help local businesses grow and meet their objectives. These may include increasing their quantity of customers, clients and patrons as well as hiring local people to meet increased demands for services and products.

LEGG assistance is available on a no-charge basis (that’s for free) to Lyons Area Chamber of Commerce members. Since its inception, LEGG has worked with about 20 local businesses, helping in a variety of ways. LEGG has also presented several seminars for local businesses regarding important aspects of owning and operating a small business. The next presentation will be on January 26 at 6 p.m. in the Community Church. The title is “Website Basics: Taking the Next Step in Marketing Your Business”. Presenters will be Bill VanLeeuwen, owner of X2M Inc. and Jeff Gagliardi, owner of Gagliardi Creative Design Inc.

In the first of this series we introduced Bill VanLeeuwen. In this article we introduce Christy Crosser who is very well known in Lyons as the former co-chair of the Lyons Community Foundation and a very active community member. Crosser is a native Coloradoan and has lived in Utah and Iowa, where

she graduated from Ottumwa High School. Ottumwa is the same town as the fictitious character Radar O’Reilly on MASH. She earned a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of Utah in Public Administration and Community Health Education, and a Masters of Education in Organization Development from Colorado State University. Her career in health care started while in undergraduate school at Utah’s College of Health when she and a nurse submitted a grant application to the federal government for $50,000 to open a clinic in Park City, Utah. This clinic provided preventive health care services to women.

Crosser went on to serve in many roles in the area of women’s health and family planning including the director of a regional training and technical assistance program, serving six western states; project officer for the Department of Health and Human Services, Denver regional office; and now consulting. In her role as a project officer, she was involved in granting federal funds to state health departments and monitoring these programs. All of the programs Christy worked with have offered subsidized health care to low income families.

Staying in the health care industry but shifting areas, Crosser served as the project manager for the Rural Hospital Performance Improvement Project, working with 123 small, rural hospitals located in the rural Mississippi Delta Region. Consultation was offered to these under-resourced hospitals to improve performance. The offerings included an assessment of their service area demographics; clinic service line assessment and physician practice evaluation; financial review; and an assessment of their management, governance and leadership components. After six years of directing this project, 80 percent of the eligible hospitals received over 300 consultations from expert consultants throughout the country.

The next career move was establishing her own consulting business, C2 Strategies, which exists today working with health care agencies in several states in the areas of fund development (fundraising and proposal writing); governance, board and management training; federal funding regulation compliance audits; and marketing services in small, rural communities. Crosser moved to the Lyons area with her husband Dennis Johnstone six years ago.

For more information about LEGG or the Chamber of Commerce, please contact the Lyons Area Chamber of Commerce at 303-823-5215 or e-mail legg@lyons-colorado.com.

John O’Brien is the chairman of the Lyons Economic Gardening Group, LEGG and president of the Lyons Chamber of Commerce. He has worked in business and industry for many years and teaches classes at the University of Denver. He lives in Lyons. For more information on LEGG or the Chamber of Commerce please contact legg@lyons-colorado.com or call aq303-823-5215.

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