Mobilizing Communities to Improve Population Health

Communities across the country are plagued with rising poverty, failing education systems, growing unemployment and an alarming number of children with significant health issues- including obesity and malnutrition. With a focus on education, income, and health, United Way's community impact and engagement work seeks to address the societal and economic factors that impact population health. Similarly, the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps determinates of health model provides a complementary framework for creating broad community understanding, engagement and planning. This session will describe United Way of Greater Toledo's integrated approach to addressing the social determinates of health by increasing high school graduation rates. Focusing to improve one community indicator, provides a practical and manageable method for narrowing priorities, creating comprehensive strategies, and implementing integrated plans of action to achieve maximum collective impact. Concrete action steps on how a community can successfully engaged diverse stakeholders and systems to generate significant resources and drive measurable progress will be outlined. With an emphasis on improving policies, systems and environmental change, the process a community can take to move from recognition of the causes of poor health outcomes to strategy development, implementation and evaluation will also be explored. Improving population health requires hospitals, public health, government, nonprofit organization, education systems, faith-based communities and neighborhoods to take a holistic approach that incorporates and aligns work across sectors.