A national movement to mobilize action and change toward healthier communities: Collaborative Community Health Planning and Policy Development

CDC's Healthy Communities Program works with coalitions, states, and national organizations that focus their resources on community-level change to develop strategies to reduce tobacco use and exposure, promote physical activity and healthy eating, improve access to quality preventive health care services, and implement policy to address built environments and sustainable environmental change. Program focus also builds on the experiences of community-based chronic disease prevention programs to provide local communities with funding, tools, and strategies to implement and sustain policy, systems and environmental changes in chronic disease prevention and health promotion. Critical to the technical assistance process employed is a series of in-person training sessions called Action Institutes, which employs peer-to-peer learning, sharing of expertise from national partners and states ,and fostering of a community of learning through a battery of funded communities. Outcomes of this program include increasing capacity for communities, states and national partners to develop and disseminate tools, models, and strategies for collaborating with a broad cross-section of partners to implement policy, systems, and environmental changes that will help build healthier communities. In the years following the implementation of this model, evaluation of this training series indicates that participants benefit greatly from the comprehensive nature of the trainings to share lessons learned and successful strategies from other communities. This session will discuss the how the CDC's Healthy Communities Program has provided support and training to local, state and national partners to build capacity to create a national movement to mobilize action and change toward healthier communities.