CDC's Integrated Approach to Sustainable Community Change Using Policy, Systems, and Environmental Change Strategies

Characteristics that determine the health of a community are interdependent and ongoing and require crosscutting, sustainable approaches to change. These characteristics include the built environment (sidewalks, bike paths, mixed-use developments, and smoke-free public places), access to healthy foods (in restaurants, cafeterias, corner stores, farmer's markets), and health behavior (using stairs vs. elevators). Addressing these root causes of community health using an integrated approach and strategies that are sustainable not only supports public health system capacity, but it also ensures efficient and effective use of resources across a broad range of public health concerns, improving the health of the greatest number of people with the least investment of resources. Additionally, chronic diseases and conditions such as asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity and their associated risk factors — tobacco use and exposure, poor nutrition, and physical inactivity — are inter-related and cannot be effectively addressed in isolation of one another. CDC's Healthy Communities Program funds national networks and communities across the country to work together with coalitions and a multitude of partners, across sectors of their populations and across chronic diseases and risk factors, to promote health and prevent disease by addressing the root causes and using policy, systems, and environmental change strategies that will remain when federal funding ends. CDC's Healthy Communities Program is changing the way public health agencies conduct business—making more efficient use of federal funds and resources; helping put an end to work being done in “disease silos,” minimizing duplicate effort, and promoting sustainable change.