Community Action Model

Community partnerships can achieve impressive and lasting results from healthy community initiatives that fully employ the Community Action Model. These impacts stem from actions taken during the 3P Action Cycle, integrating the Essential Practices, and from each of the strategies that are implemented.

Early Impacts

• Promotions and programs can help generate attention within a community and deliver early wins that build public support for more complex policy and systems changes.
• The Partner and Prepare action steps result in stronger relationships between partners and community members, motivating and mobilizing them to work for a healthier community.
• Community leaders and coalitions will also have a better understanding of their community, more experience setting priorities, new health leadership opportunities, and success in leveraging resources.

Intermediate Impacts

• Successful implementation of projects that can support future policies (e.g., shared-used agreements, complete streets design guidelines, and supermarket and garden ordinances) and built environments (e.g., “pop-up” projects, new sidewalks, gardens, farmers’ markets, and community gathering spaces) build credibility and capacity, allowing healthy community work to deepen in a community.
• When policies and environmental changes that support health are maintained, they not only create improved community conditions, but can also outlast shifting budgets or turnover in organizations.
• Other impacts can include new investments; re-directed budget priorities to support more healthy community projects; stronger relationships and collaboration between community members and decision makers; and new staff in various organizations and agencies for ongoing work.

Sustainable Impacts

• Systems changes include an integrated web of policies, places, programs, and other resources that support equitable health in a community. Multiple sectors work collaboratively to align their priorities.
• Health becomes embedded into institutional processes. For example, government departments may change the way they operate by prioritizing spending, new development, and built environment projects to maximize services and policies and provide safe, affordable access to healthy lifestyles for all community members.
• Community norms begin to shift as mutually reinforcing policies, systems, environments, and programs increase opportunities for healthier behaviors and public demand for conditions that support healthy living.

Community Change

• As systems and norms change in a community, partnerships and relationships also continue to evolve with intention and increasing capacity, enabling coalitions to address other important quality-of-life issues.
• Community members have more equitable health outcomes and maintain influence in decisions that affect them. Businesses, governments, nonprofits, and coalitions understand their role in reinforcing community members’ expectations and priorities. Communities experience a host of benefits from their long-standing priority on health, including increased civic engagement, employment, educational attainment, safety, and quality of life.
• Successful and sustainable healthy community change initiatives will ultimately create a culture of health in communities, where health is embedded in the community’s identity. The neighborhoods, schools, parks, streets, food venues, and other public spaces where the changes occur support and reflect healthy patterns of living, learning, working, and playing, serving as role models to other communities beginning their path to better health.