Mobilizing multi-sector partners to achieve countywide community goals

For nearly two decades the Community Assessment Project has convened a broad cross-section of county residents to measure quality of life, set community goals and develop comprehensive plans for community health improvement. This session will describe initiatives to achieve the goal of providing comprehensive health insurance coverage to all children of the county and the goal of reducing violence and its impact in the community. In 2004, Healthy Kids was born out of a community-wide effort to address the growing number of uninsured residents, including approximately 5,000 children. Local leaders invested community resources to provide comprehensive health insurance for these children. Healthy Kids also provides enrollment assistance for children eligible for federally-funded programs. In 2011, our community began mobilizing to make smarter decisions regarding our justice system. Our Sheriff led the planning for alternative ways to supervise low-level offenders. He worked with community stakeholders to create the Custody Alternatives Program that allows individuals to serve sentences through community service while working and participating in pro-social supports. These two initiatives illustrate many of the same elements of success, including engaging community members to harness their ideas, especially those personally experiencing the issue, articulating the roles that different groups can play, pooling resources and working collaboratively across sectors, quantifying the inequities that exist for residents across race, ethnicity, income and immigration status and devising plans to overcome these inequities. These initiatives also demonstrate the importance of program evaluation, measurement of community health improvement and communication of the results to the community.