Change Project: Healthy Communities articles

An Introduction to Healthy Cities and Communities

Healthy Communities is a method for improving entire communities, cities, and regions. (9k)
Healthy Economy, Healthy Communities lays out the theoretical basis for Healthy Communities work in the New Economics (25K).

Catalyzing the community is the first step. This major article gets you started. (44k)
Once you have gotten things going, what does it take to sustain the effort? (53k). A major article goes over the problem in detail with people who have field experience, and a major study gives some further pointers. (5k)
A broad "how to" article will give you the basics of how a healthcare system can begin to build a healthier community - and much of what we say here can be used by governments, ecucational instutions, in fact anyone who sets out to create change beyond their own gates. (29k)

Projects from around the country and around the world give some powerful examples of how communities can re-build themselves. (23k)
Healthy Communities: A compendium of best practices focuses on specific practices and projects, most of them sponsored by healthcare systems. (104k)
Four case studies of community transformation recount the process in much greater detail.
One method of making a healthy community is to build it from the ground up. Disney's effort to do just that is profiled in Celebration: Technostalgia (27k) and in What if you could build it? which looks specifically at Celebration Health, Florida Hospital's radical collaboration with Disney (25k)
Six "exemplary" collaborations are broad examples of entire communities at work re-growing themselves. (3k)
Healthy Cities and Communities efforts that have Web sites include Healthy Pittsburgh/Allegheny County, the little community of Sheraden in Pittsburgh, Ontario, Canada, and "Sustainable Germany."
As part of its healthy community initiative, Healthy Valley 2000 is creating an Electronic Valley to create an information and communication system on the Internet that links together all segments of a community of six towns in Connecticut with a combined population of 100,000. The site includes links to other healthy community sites.

Community Assessments: Five Perspectives gives a range of opinions about the many methods of evaluating the health of communities. (6k)
Measuring What's Working is a brief look at alternative methods already in place for evaluating a community's overall progress on many different issues. (3k)
Here are a few of the many Local Actions you can take to leverage change. (6k)
The ten keys to successful collaboration count all the elements that David Chrislip and Carl Larson found in all successful community collaborations. (3k)
The form of the organization you use may or may not matter. (3k)
Four brief observations on how change works in building healthy communities (5k)

The "Healthy Communities" movement and Healthcare shows how the new economics of healthcare are driving even profit-making healthcare organizations to attempt to build healthy communities. (15k)
Three case histories follow three healthcare systems over two years as they attempt to build the health of the communities in which they operate. (144k)

"Future Search" is one effective tool for coherently shifting the direction of entire organizations and communities. (33k)
David Chrislip explores leadership and community-building:

People begin to look not for a leader but for "leaders" in the plural. Because, in fact, many people have the capacity to lead.

(36k)
Len Duhl is the founder of the Healthy Cities/Healthy Communities movement. (30k)
Ilona Kickbush of the World Health Organization is one the the prime movers in taking Duhl's ideas and turning them into a global phenomenon. (30k)
Healthcare futurist Jeff Goldsmith picks apart the economics of community-building for health systems (5k)
"Anti-economist" Hazel Henderson discusses the powerful effect that our economic yardsticks have on how we shape our communities (26k)
Health futurist Leland Kaiser talks about the role of healthcare boards in building healthier communities. (3k)
Judith Kurland, the driving force behind Healthy Boston, addresses the "art of inclusion" in gathering coalitions. (8k)
The head of the U.S.-China Educational Institute, Hanmin Liu, who has investigated collaborative projects around the world, gives a brief point of view about what makes collaboration work. (3k)
Marilu McPhedran, former head of Healthy Toronto, talks politics - and survival. (9k)

The Contact Center Network maintains a comprehensive Web directory of nonprofit resources, with over 2,500 links to organizations, directories and publications, arranged by geography as well as by issue.