Increasing community impact through policy and environmental change in suburban Cook County, Illinois

The Cook County Department of Public Health (CCDPH) which serves a geopolitically complex jurisdiction, comprised of nearly 2.3 million people residing in 125 communities, has traditionally addressed increasing rates of chronic disease through service oriented work. A demographic shift from urban centers to suburban communities among impoverished and minority populations coupled with decreased resources, initiated an agency shift from traditional public health towards policy and environmental change strategies in order to ensure greatest impact. In March 2010, a Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) grant administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was awarded to CCDPH and the Public Health Institute of Metropolitan Chicago. This expansive obesity prevention initiative provided CCDPH the fiscal and human resources required to expand a policy and environmental change agenda. Given the complexities of working within a large, multi-faceted jurisdiction – with no centralized government entities - strategic organization of coalition partners, regionalized outreach and community engagement was needed to ensure success of the CPPW initiative. CPPW enabled CCDPH to undertake an organization of the structures and systems necessary so that policy and environmental change can become a reality in SCC. This session will provide a snapshot of the organization of these systems and strategies from forming our leadership team, regionalizing staff and using incident command to implement our work. In addition, this session will describe how federal initiatives like CPPW can enable local health department capacity building and assist financially strapped public health agencies in delivering strategies that display the greatest impact.