Our Services

Strategic partner to funders, associations, nonprofits, and more

We work with philanthropies, associations, and others to engage local leaders and residents in community-designed, community-led, strategies to equitably improve local health and wellbeing.

Healthy Places by Design develops solutions to help clients achieve their goals and create meaningful change in their communities.

What We Do

Healthy Places by Design specializes in helping our clients and funders advance health equity and create healthy communities through policy, systems, and environmental changes. Our services are designed to provide direct technical assistance, support, training, and tools to community coalitions and leaders to drive actual systems-level community-health change.

We offer the following services to help our clients achieve their goals:

Strategic Consulting and Advising:

Our experts work closely with clients to design and manage initiatives supporting health equity and healthy communities. We provide strategic guidance and tailored solutions to help clients achieve their goals.

Community Leader Assistance:

Healthy Places by Design offers direct technical assistance, insights, and support to community coalitions and leaders. Our services include training and tools to drive systems-level change.

Collaborative Learning Facilitation:

HPBD designs and manages comprehensive, tailored collaborative learning and networking initiatives that foster generative thinking, develop new partnerships, and share wisdom and resources.

Our Approach

In our collaborative work with community leaders and residents, their funders, and other key partners, our Community Action Model guides our way. The model highlights the importance of a community’s context, defines six essential practices for success, and outlines a 3P Action Cycle: Partner, Prepare, and Progress. It represents more than 20 years of learning and refinement by Healthy Places By Design and is a well-tested approach for local investments.

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Two featured programs

Learn more about two specific ways we are helping funders and associations today, one a rising topic area in community-health circles (addressing social isolation and loneliness), and the other is an immersive leadership development experience we developed in partnership with influential international experts in the collaborative leadership field:

Social connectedness

We help regional, local, and national health-focused foundations and aligned organizations explore ways to enhance social connectedness locally as a layer to achieving broader health- and wellbeing-improvement aims.

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Collaboration Lab

We provide this training to community-level leaders and cultivate powerful, elegant collaboration skills in service to positive systems-level change.

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Since 2002, our organization has supported more than 200 community partnerships in 42 states, working on behalf of dozens of philanthropic organizations. This map shows the range of locales in which we’ve helped investors make meaningful impact around community-led improvement to health and wellbeing.

Where Weve Worked_2020_Combined_BlueText

Select Clients

Here are some of the amazing funders, associations, and other investors in community-led strategies that we have worked with:

Aetna Foundation

American Public Health Association

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of NC Foundation

Center for Rural Strategies

Council on Black Health

County Health Rankings and Roadmaps

Danville Regional Foundation

Foundation for Social Connection

Institute for the Advancement of Minority Health

John Hancock

Michigan Fitness Foundation

National Association of Chronic Disease Directors

New York State Health Foundation

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute

W.K. Kellogg Foundation

Let's Work Together!

Do you seek to engage local leaders and residents in community-designed, community-led strategies to measurably improve local health and well-being? We can help.
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