Missoula County COVID-19 Documentation Project Collection, 2020-2023

Public health statements from county health department (daily/weekly updates), Zoom meetings, Election videos, "Keeping on going" videos with 5 or so businesses and how they dealt with COVID, Monte (University of Montana mascot) getting vaccine video

Meeting agendas, meeting notes, media summaries

Meeting agendas, updates, memo

Meeting minutes

Meeting notes, public Incident Action Plan (IAP) reports

Meeting minutes, press releases

Situation reports, meeting notes

Instagram posts, Facebook posts

Adriane Beck discusses her role as the director of the Office of Emergency Management for Missoula County during the COVID pandemic. Beck relates her path in the emergency management profession. She discusses pre-COVID-19 crisis preparation, and the importance of the incident command system to emergency response. She also discusses programs developed during the pandemic to address various issues, including access to PPE and COVID tests, food security, vaccinations and, especially, the development of programs and facilities to address homelessness and non-congregate shelters for those being quarantined. The interview concludes with Beck’s broader reflections on the response, meaning, lessons and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cindy Farr discusses her roles as the Health Promotion director for the Missoula City-County Health Department and the Missoula COVID-19 incident commander during the COVID pandemic. Farr relates her path to public health. She discusses the evolution of Missoula’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including masks, closures and vaccinations. She also discusses how she and the Health Department approached the critical issue of health communication during a pandemic. The interview concludes with Farr’s broader reflections on the response, meaning, lessons and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ellen Leahy discusses her role as the health officer and director of the Missoula City-County Health Department during the first part of the COVID pandemic. She discusses her long career in public health and how past experiences and training shaped her response to the COVID pandemic. She also discusses her work on the history of public health and pandemic diseases and how her research on these topics has shaped her approach to public health. She relates her perspective on how the pandemic emerged and changed over time. Leahy explains the role of a health officer and health department director and the way the department interacts with other government entities, and she details how policies and programs related to testing, tracing, lockdowns, masking and vaccines developed and changed over time in Missoula County.

Diane Sands discusses her role as a Democrat in the Montana State Senate representing parts of Missoula County during the COVID pandemic. She relates her extensive background in activism, politics and public history. She describes how the state politics interacted with local politics in Montana during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how the pandemic shaped political culture in the Senate and in politics more broadly. Topics discussed include attacks on the Montana Constitution, a retreat from trust in government and science, and changing dynamics surrounding the balance between local and state governance. Sands also discusses how her understanding of history, her philosophy of politics, and her experiences shape how she approached the pandemic, both as a politician and as an individual.

Kavan Peterson discusses his role as the president of Harvest Home Care, a Missoula company that provides in-home care services for elders during the COVID pandemic. Peterson discusses how he got into the issues surrounding elder care. He discusses how the pandemic affected elder care and the mental well-being of elders, in general, and how the pandemic revealed aspects of how we treat elders in our society. He discusses how his company responded to the pandemic, including issues surrounding mask availability, staff safety, mental health and vaccination of staff. He discusses the interactions of a private business with government and local, state and federal levels. The interview concludes with Peterson’s broader reflections on the response, meaning and impact of COVID-19, and the importance of understanding the history of pandemics.

David Strohmaier discusses his role as a Missoula County commissioner during the COVID pandemic. He discusses his experience as a wildland firefighter, professional historian and his path to working in local government, first as a city council member and then as a county commissioner. He outlines the way Missoula’s county government works, and the main issues the county faced prior to the pandemic. He discusses how local governments adapted to the pandemic, and the major pandemic-related policies and programs that he was involved with, including the development of programs to address people experiencing homelessness and those needing to quarantine in non-congregate residences. Strohmaier also discusses the importance of history to addressing the pandemic, and his role in advocating for funding to document the experience of, and response to, the pandemic in Missoula. The interview concludes with Strohmaier’s reflections on how the pandemic interacted with other aspects of county politics, and the broader meaning, lessons and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hannah Kosel discusses her role as the program application specialist at the Missoula Food Bank and Community Center during the COVID pandemic. In this interview, they discuss the Food Bank’s efforts to assist tenants in getting help from the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, a program designed to help renters facing hardship due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kosel details how the rental assistance program worked, how it changed, and issues with the program. She also discusses the Food Bank’s response to the pandemic, the Missoula housing affordability crisis and city politics. The interview concludes with Kosel’s broader reflections on the response, meaning, lessons and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zeke Campfield discusses his role as the director of the Housing Advocates Network (HAN), a program of the Missoula Interfaith Collaborative (MIC), during the COVID pandemic. Campfield relates how he got into social work. He discusses his role as an organizer of HAN volunteers who assist people facing or experiencing homelessness. And he discusses how the pandemic affected HAN by, among other things, reducing volunteers and increasing the need for HAN’s services. He also discusses some ways that both the pandemic and the pandemic response affected housing and housing assistance in Missoula. He discusses his and HAN’s approach to helping people. The interview also includes the ways the pandemic affected Campfield personally, and his broader reflection on its meaning and impact.

Laurie Francis discusses her role as the executive director of Partnership Health Clinic during the COVID pandemic. Partnership is a federally qualified health center that is part of the Missoula County government. Francis details how Partnership responded to the pandemic in terms of communications with staff, protections for staff, the use of telehealth, and other changes to patient care. Francis discusses Partnership’s long interest in issues of justice and health equity, the way that the pandemic affected and revealed health disparities, and the ways that Partnership tried to address issues of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion as an institution during the pandemic.

John Engen discusses his role as the mayor of the City of Missoula during the COVID pandemic. He relates his view on the different phases of the pandemic and how knowledge of the coronavirus changed over time. Engen discusses Missoula’s form of city government and how this shaped the response to the pandemic, along with emergency measures taken by the city government early on. He details the controversy over the purchase of the Sleepy Inn for non-congregate shelter. He also discusses the importance of communication during the pandemic and the strategies that he and other local government officials used to try to convey information to the public.

Rob Watson discusses his role as superintendent of Missoula County Public Schools during the COVID pandemic. Watson details the emerging and changing knowledge of the pandemic and how he, other administrators, and the school board developed methods for making decisions about the pandemic. He discusses school closures and the development of online and hybrid teaching methods and how these changes affected students, parents, teachers and the community. He also discusses the emergence of controversies over masking, vaccines and school system governance in general.

Jesse Ramos discusses his role as a Missoula City Council member during the COVID pandemic. Ramos details his perspective on how the pandemic emerged and changed over time. He discusses his relationship, as a conservative libertarian, to other city council members and the mayor. He relates his views on how the pandemic and pandemic-related policies affected Missoulians, businesses and the economy more broadly. He discusses his views on the city’s purchase of the Sleepy Inn during the pandemic, the role of local administrators in making health policy, and state-level and federal-level policies such as vaccine mandates.

Grace Decker discusses her role as coordinator for the United Way’s Zero to Five program in Missoula County as well as her service as a school board trustee for Missoula County Public Schools during the COVID pandemic. Zero to Five is a project to discuss how to enrich and invest in the experiences of young children to help them succeed in life. Decker discusses how concerns about this age demographic shaped her approach to the COVID pandemic, and how once the pandemic struck, she worked with local organizations to create emergency child care resources and to develop an Emergency Child Care Task Force. Decker also details the issues of childcare that preceded the pandemic – low pay for workers, high costs for parents – and how the pandemic exacerbated and otherwise shaped those issues. Decker ends by relating her experience on the school board, how issues surrounding COVID and school were increasingly politicized, and how threats and intimidation personally affected her.

Lauren Wilson discusses her role as a pediatrician at Community Medical Center and Vice President of the Montana Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics during the COVID pandemic. She details how Community and other hospitals responded to the pandemic, and how the pandemic affected patient care, hospital capacity, hospital resources and staffing. She discusses some of the ways the pandemic affected children, teens and families, in terms of care, contact with hospitalized and dying family members, access to food and healthcare, and mental health. She gives her perspective on how local, state and federal response, including policies and programs related to testing, shutdowns, masking and vaccines.

Tim Nielson discusses his role as an art teacher and union representative at Sentinel High School during the COVID pandemic. He details school closures and changes in teaching methods. He relates how his own approaches to teaching changes, as well as a perspective on how other teachers thought about closures, school changes and general policy response to the COVID pandemic. He also discusses some ways the pandemic may have affected students.

D’Shane Barnett discusses his role as executive director of the All Nations Health Center as well as his role as the health officer and director of the Missoula City-County Health Department during the COVID pandemic. Barnett is Native American and All Nations Health Center is a clinic that integrates culturally based, holistic health services for Native Americans and the surrounding community. Barnett discusses how the clinic operates, how it responded to the COVID pandemic, and his sense of how COVID intersected with Native American health issues in the community. Barnett then discusses how he shifted to becoming health officer and director of the Missoula City-County Health Department in May of 2021, and how his previous experience in Native American health care shaped his approach to that position. Barnett details how vaccine rollout programs went, inter-governmental relations, the importance of public health communication and education, and the way that broader social structures limit what can be done in an emergency.

Jason McMackin discusses his role as a co-owner and manager of the Burns Street Bistro and Brasserie Port Rouge restaurants in Missoula during the COVID pandemic. He relates challenges to the restaurant, and more broadly the service industry, during the pandemic and the response of different types of service industries to public health regulations. McMackin talks about the importance of federal assistance for businesses during the pandemic, the importance of supporting workers, and the effect of the pandemic, good and bad, on his business and Missoula in general.

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