My work building Healthy Community Zones with Urban Health Partnerships and the TOUCH initiative in Broward County is in full swing. Working with transportation engineers, city and county leadership, health care professionals, education leaders, law enforcement, and most importantly, residents, we’ve been busy conducting Walking Audits and extensive data gathering to connect and build upon existing plans.
A huge thank you to the host organizations for your time and effort to coordinate these events in a very short time L A Lee YMCA (Ft. Lauderdale), Austin Hepburn Center (Hallandale Beach), C W Thomas Park (Dania Beach), and Delevoe Park (Broward County Municipal Services District).
Up next the building of Community Action Plans that will guide work for the next two years and beyond. Follow TOUCH Broward on Facebook and on Twitter @TOUCHBroward for lots of photos. Here’s what it looks like in action:
Citizen centered health promotion policy development in action. Photo credits to Beny Schonfeld.
You know people are committed when they show up for Walking Audits in the mid-afternoon South Florida August heat!!
As we begin tackling the Community Action Plan building phase, a great resource is the leader in Health In All policies work, Change Lab Solutions.
ChangeLab Solutions provides community-based solutions for America’s most common and preventable diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and asthma. Our solutions promote the common good by making healthier choices easier for everyone.
Their graphic rich, brilliantly simple tools translate the complicated process of policy, system, and environmental change into tools for community action. These are customizable and beautifully tie in the health in all policies framework into economic development and sustainability. All tools are available at Change Lab Solutions with direct links below:
Presentation Make the case
Health In All Policies Guide Understand Health In All Policies implementation
Model Policies Tools for plan development
Our method for building Community Action Plans is based on tools from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and built with the necessary rigor to potentially secure implementation funding. This is what we love, translating community goals into formalized plans that match the right funder to that effort. The TOUCH Healthy Community Zones are on their way!
