Healthy Communities: Community collaboration to reduce obesity in Snohomish County, WA

This presentation will offer attendees an overview and discussion of Healthy Communities (HC) projects in Snohomish County, WA. The cities of Marysville, Lynnwood and Everett, WA are currently engaged in varying stages of this multi-year community mobilization process in which policy makers and community members partner with public health to address rising rates of obesity and chronic disease. The goal of this process is for each community to develop and implement an action plan whereby environments are created that will promote physical activity and improved nutrition. HC focuses on policy-level changes in order to make “the healthy choice the easy choice” for residents of participating communities.

The many partnerships that are central to this process will be discussed. Partnerships that have been shown to be critical to this process include those between public health and planning, city government, community members, and other non-traditional public health providers. An overview of the HC framework will also be provided with a focus on facilitation of the process from the perspective of a county-level health district.

Brief updates on the progress and evaluation of Snohomish County's three HC sites will be given and lessons learned from our experiences thus far will be shared.