Consulting and Advising
Our decades of experience make us strategic and informed planning, implementation, and assessment partners.
Healthy Places by Design has partnered with nonprofits, philanthropies, and other community organizations in more than 40 states to address complex social problems that impact population health. We’ve learned that authentic, community-led, and sustainable change not only takes time, but also requires a strategic and equitable approach. As your strategic partner, we can help you:
Strengthen organizational capacity to deepen impact.
Our team deepens the impact of nonprofits, philanthropies, associations, and other community organizations by building internal capacity to assess, develop, and implement strategies that improve community health and wellbeing. We can partner with you to provide strategic and sustainability planning; conduct landscape analysis and offer recommendations to inform future investments; build staff capacity to support community leaders; co-develop resources and tools; and/or design and facilitate key meetings.
Mat-Su Health Foundation
For the Mat-Su Health Foundation in Alaska, we assessed communities' social connection strategy needs, opportunities, and roles and helped them to integrate those into their program and Community Health Improvement plans.
Michigan Health
Endowment Fund
Our team conducted a statewide assessment of built environment initiatives and identified gaps in resources and community engagement practices that are equitable, meaningful, and inclusive.
Y-USA Leaders
Healthy Places by Design co-designed and facilitated a strategic planning meeting to help Y-USA leaders align and prioritize social connection internally and across all leading practices for YMCA organizations.
Support grantmaking processes.
Sustaining healthy community initiatives requires a long view of investments and includes identifying how to leverage all assets in a community, coalition, or organization to ensure that changes in systems, policies, practices, and programs are built to last. We provide holistic support for program structure, grant application design and review; logistics support such as subcontracting and grants management; reimbursements; and travel and meeting coordination.
John Rex Endowment
For John Rex Endowment, our team co-designed and supported a three-year initiative to build municipal capacity to implement strategies, enhance policies and planning documents, and improve built environment to expand vulnerable children’s access to healthy food and safe opportunities for physical activity.
Institute for the Advancement of Minority Health
We partnered with the Institute for the Advancement of Minority Health and others over four years to co-design and support a program helping community-based organizations implement tobacco cessation strategies among rural African American men in the Mississippi Delta River Region.
Council on Black Health
Healthy Places by Design and the Council on Black Health co-created a discovery and pilot process to support Black Health through Socially Connected Communities with leaders from three neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Design and lead projects and initiatives.
Serving as strategic partners, we have extensive experience in the co-design and co-leading of comprehensive community health projects and initiatives. Our support includes collaborative grant writing, project development, strategic implementation and logistics support, and managing workplans and timelines.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Healthy Places by Design served as the National Program Office for three Robert Wood Johnson Foundation initiatives over 12 years. Our team supported formative stages of program design and co-designed and led the technical assistance model, peer learning network, annual convenings, and the national advisory committee.
New Jersey Health Initiatives
We supported New Jersey Health Initiatives’ Upstream Action Acceleration initiative with program development, call for proposals and grantee selection, collaborative learning, technical assistance, and program wrap-up, resulting in a statewide network of coalitions implementing cross-sector strategies to improve health.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation
Our team advanced Clinical-Community Partnerships by working with Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation and Care Share Health Alliance on capacity building and logistics supports that helped local partnerships change policies and environments for better health and wellbeing.
Community Leadership & Action
Healthy Places by Design helps community leaders and emerging to long-standing partnerships effectively work together using an inclusive, equity-focused lens.
We provide individualized support to deepen collaborative leadership, address emerging needs, and apply tools in real time. Our evidence-based, community-tested Community Action Model provides a deep well of resources and concepts from which our services are tailored. It includes Essential Practices that are critical for creating meaningful and sustained change in communities, and an Action Cycle of Partnership, Preparation, and Progress to transform policies, systems, and environments for improved community health.
Support coalition building.
We help community leaders tailor evidence-based and practice-tested approaches to their unique community context and translate them into practical next steps. Our team can help with evaluating impact; recruitment, orientation, and support for new health-focused coalitions; strategic prioritization and work plan development; longer-range guidance/assistance to cohorts of community partnerships; and specific needs or skill-building trainings such as community engagement and collaborative leadership.
Impact Alamance
Our team partnered with Impact Alamance for 10 years to co-develop and evolve the structure, strength, and strategies of the Alamance Wellness Collaborative, a county-level coalition that works to create a healthy community for all.
Danville Regional Foundation
Healthy Places by Design supported the Health and Education Collaboratives in partnership with Danville Regional Foundation, including strategic goal development, partner roles and capacity building, outreach and evaluation.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
As part of the Healthy Kids, Healthy Families national portfolio funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we supported 49 community coalitions with workplan development, coaching, technical assistance, learning meetings, and skill-building.
Deepen knowledge and skills of individual leaders.
We provide support to leaders in philanthropies, nonprofits, and other organizations that deepens their capacity to address equitable policy, systems, and environmental changes in communities. Our team can partner with leaders to provide technical assistance; co-create tools and resources; co-design fellowship programs; and coach individual leaders in their roles.
Training and Capacity Building
We have made training and capacity building publicly available through webinars that address timely issues and notable thought leaders on health, equity, and socially connected communities. Examples include a series of Socially Connected Communities Network webinars and County Health Rankings & Roadmaps monthly webinars.
Discussion Groups
We have facilitated publicly available discussion group sessions through our Socially Connected Communities Network and in partnership with County Health Rankings & Roadmaps that enable participants to engage thought leaders, practitioners, and peers in communities across the nation in focused conversations about applying and implementing promising strategies.
Resource Guides
Our team produced and co-produced resource guides on sub-topics related to addressing health, equity, and social connections, and made them available on our website.
Learning and Networking
Our team co-creates welcoming spaces, structures, and activities that foster innovative thinking, develop new partnerships, and inspire sharing of wisdom and resources.
Community change leaders need opportunities to learn, develop supportive relationships, recharge their motivation, and remind themselves that they are part of something bigger. Through our collaborative learning and networking support, we create mutually beneficial exchanges among leaders and community members that lead to action, network-building, and sustained impact at local, regional, and national scales.
Co-design and manage logistics for public learning opportunities.
Our team will work with you to design the content, structure, and logistics for public learning opportunities that expand participants' knowledge, amplify their ideas, and promote relevant resources and tools. We can help with developing conferences, workshops and trainings, webinars, discussion groups, and creating thought leadership series such as blogs, podcasts, and articles.
Foundation for Social Connection
Healthy Places by Design co-designed and co-hosted two national convenings on Social Connection with the Foundation for Social Connection, the first-of-their-kind cross-sector gatherings on this topic.
Kitsap Public Health Department
We provided a keynote presentation and co-produced/led a county-wide workshop on Socially Connected Communities with Kitsap (WA) Public Health Department, resulting in commitments to action and new partnerships.
United Way
Our team provided healthy community and social connection presentations to state United Way networks.
Design and lead learning and networking opportunities tailored to specific cohorts.
Our team has extensive experience managing cohort learning opportunities including in-person, hybrid, and all-virtual gatherings that can be structured as a one-time event, an ongoing series, or a comprehensive learning approach that is integrated into larger initiatives. Examples include developing communities of practice, discussion groups, site visit design and management, peer learning journeys, and workshops and trainings.
Narratives for Health Initiative
Healthy Places by Design partnered with the Narratives for Health Initiative to produce and facilitate a series of health equity narratives facilitator trainings to build capacity and momentum for narrative change to occur at local and national levels.
Communities of Practice
Led the development and facilitation of communities of practice for community partnerships supported by the American Public Health Association, National Association of Chronic Disease Directors, Michigan Fitness Foundation, and more. The communities of practice provide a mix of learning, practical application, and peer networking.
Workshops
Presented tailored training through workshops that helped changemakers in the Kitsap Public Health District (WA), District 10 Health Department of Michigan, and Maine Resilience Network address health, equity, social connectedness, and community collaboration.
Field Building
We strengthen the healthy communities field by increasing community change agents' capacity to work across sectors and respond to emergent needs.
Our team's multidisciplinary background allows us to build knowledge and skills by providing resources on specific content areas while highlighting how community systems are intertwined: improvements in one sector have rippling effects on others.
Identify and assess emergent issues in the healthy communities field.
Since the founding of our organization, Healthy Places by Design has incorporated ongoing learning into our team’s culture. As communities’ demand and capacity for change has grown, we’ve evolved alongside them to support coalitions that are addressing root causes of health inequities at community, organizational, and systems levels. We help organizations identify important issues and emerging trends relevant to their work.
Thought Leadership
Healthy Places by Design provided leadership to groups influencing the healthy communities field such as the Global Initiative on Loneliness and Connection, North Carolina Institute of Medicine Task Force on Healthy Aging, Safe Routes to School National Partnership, and PEAK Grantmaking.
National Association of Chronic Disease Directors
We served as a subject matter expert to the National Association of Chronic Disease Directors for their Building Resilient Inclusive Communities (BRIC) program. Twenty BRIC states engaged more than 60 communities to address food and nutrition security, safe physical activity access, and social connectedness through policy, systems, and environmental change strategies.
RRF Foundation for Aging
For the RRF Foundation for Aging, our team assessed learning networks prioritizing social connections for older adults and across the lifespan to determine interest in a more formalized and overarching national learning network.
Create and curate field-building content.
Our team creates original content and curates relevant resources that inform and inspire the healthy communities field, including assessment and recommendation reports, practical guides, thought leadership engagements and blogs, and on-demand virtual and in-person learning and networking.
Resources
Our team develops original resources such as the Community Action Model, which provides a comprehensive overview of the community change process, our Socially Connected Communities: Solutions for Social Isolation report, and Transformative Narratives for Socially Connected Communities, which we co-produced with the Narratives for Health Initiative.
Tools and Guides
Healthy Places by Design co-develops interactive tools and step-by-step guides for local leaders such the Michigan Fitness Foundation’s PSE Exploration Process Guide and the Foundation for Social Connection’s Action Guide for Building Socially Connected Communities.
Case Study Reports
As part of larger initiatives, we produce lessons learned and case studies reports, like Lessons for Leaders (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) and six Wake County Healthy Community Grant Case Stories (John Rex Endowment).
Your strategic partner in community-led health.
Our team will work with you to develop an effective action plan with approaches ranging from standalone services and programs to an integrated strategy that addresses complex project goals, community contexts, and stakeholder needs.
