What makes a community healthy?

You may think of a healthy community as one with quality healthcare options, low disease rates, and plenty of opportunities to be active.  Perhaps it’s a place with thriving community gardens or a high-tech system for sharing health information. To create a healthy community, we start with a vision, an idea. But where do we go from there?  It’s rare that one person working alone can make a major impact. We’re most likely to achieve our collective community health goals when we work together.

A community that can collaborate well is a community that can create health. We know that there are many active groups in Sarasota County which work on similar issues and have similar goals. When groups collaborate, that work has the potential to have a great impact, be more innovative, and more responsive to the needs of the community. 

The Community Health Improvement Partnership (CHIP), through its Health System Collaboration Committee, is interested in fostering community collaborations to promote health.  Over the past several months, the committee joined with members of the Community Alliance to identify three key health priority areas – areas which need more community attention, more action.  

Now we’re prepared to help make that action happen by hosting an energetic event – the Community Health Interactive –  to encourage creative collaborations around the key priority issues. The event is intended not just for those working in the field of health, but for anyone interested in shaping health and quality of life in our community. 

At the end of the half-day event, participants will have created a web of innovative ideas and existing resources. This will be a starting point to help us understand how to best connect like-minded groups and encourage collaborative efforts to create a healthier Sarasota County.  Paired with new tools intended to help organize collaborations, new partnerships are expected to emerge along with increased action to address community health priorities.

The Community Health Interactive will:

• Bring diverse groups together and encourage collaborative efforts to achieve health goals

• Highlight examples of existing successful collaborations

• Inspire creative, innovative approaches to addressing health issues

• Introduce tools to make collaborations easier to initiate and more visible in the community

• Clarify opportunities to incentivize and support collaborations