Healthy Communities Initiatives

Over the past ten years, the National Civic League has been helping communities across the country pull together to improve their quality of life. Our staff of dedicated community-builders can assist your community by:

• Providing training in healthy communities principles, practices & tools
• Designing and facilitating short and long-term healthy communities planning projects
• Helping your community create a shared vision for the future by engaging citizens, local government, business and non-profits
• Connecting communities to a national network of healthy communities innovators at the local, state and national levels.

What Is A Healthy Community?

Pull together a group of neighbors and ask them, "What would our community look like if it were a really healthy place to live?" Chances are, their responses will not be focused strictly on health and health care. As we have posed this question to hundreds of communities across the country, the answers that we hear are:

• A clean and safe environment
• A diverse and vibrant economy
• Good housing for all
• People who respect and support each other
• A place that promotes and celebrates its cultural and historical heritage
• A place where citizens and government share power
• A place that has affordable health care for all
• A place that has good schools
• A place that has and supports strong families

Why do people identify these ideas? Because citizens understand intuitively what researchers are only beginning to uncover; that economy, housing, education, parks and recreation, a sense of belonging and health are interdependent. They are all pieces of the same puzzle that create a healthy community.

Principles of Healthy Communities

The challenges that we face in our communities are so complex that we have to learn new ways to look at them - through new eyes. Before, we tended to see our problems through a microscope, in isolation of each other and therefore, addressing them one at a time. Today we need to view our problems through a wide-angle lens; exploring the relationships that exist between them and finding the deeper solutions that can ripple through many problems. This broader approach suggests not only a fresh definition of our issues, but a new manner in which citizens, government, not-for-profits and the private sector must work together. This concept can be practiced in community work through the application of the following principles:

• A broad definition of health that goes beyond the absence of disease to address the root cause problems in communities and includes economy, education, parks and recreation, arts, mental health and community spirit and unity
• A collaborative, consensus-based approach to problem-solving that involves a diverse group of citizens from the community
• An assets-based approach to problem-solving that defines people and relationships by their skills and abilities rather than their needs and deficits
• Addressing our challenges at a systems level in the community rather than doing another short-term, low-impact project
• Creating a shared vision for the future that captures our hopes and dreams and guides our collaborative work in the community

Healthy Communities Links

NCL's Healthy Communities Publications

AHEC/Community Partners
A Massachusetts-based non-profit working to increase collaboration within and between communities, to build citizen participation, and to improve community quality of life.

Assets Based Community Development Institute
Established in 1995 by the Community Development Program at Northwestern's Institute for Policy Research, ABCD's purpose is to proliferate the findings of John Kretzmann and John L. McKnight's two decades of research on capacity-building community development. To this end, a major focus of the ABCD Institute has been the production of resources and tools for community builders involved in the process of capacity-based initiatives, helping them identify, nurture, and mobilize neighborhood assets.

Coalition for Healthier Cities/Communities
Designed to engage citizens and organizations nationwide in dialogues leading to action on what works for building healthier communities.

Colorado Healthy Communities Initiative

The Community Tool Box
Practical guidance for improving community health and development.

The Healthcare Forum
The Healthcare Forum aspires to create healthier communities by engaging leaders in building new visions and models of care for individual, organizational, and community health.

Pan American Health Organization: Healthy Municipalities and Communities
PAHO/WHO develops and strengthens regional networking activities and encourages sharing of knowledge and experiences between municipalities and countries.

Sustainable Communities Network
Linking citizens to resources and to one another to create healthy, vital, sustainable communities.