Technical Assistance Program

Health doesn’t just take place in the doctor’s office; it also is impacted by other things in our communities. Increasingly, research shows that where a person lives has a bigger impact on their health than their medical care, or as we like to say, “our zip code is more important to our health than our genetic code.”

Everyone should have equal opportunity to live in a healthy environment, including low- and moderate-income families and individuals. However, the underlying conditions in many lower-income communities can create challenges for residents to be healthy and active.

Our Technical Assistance program provides support and expertise for experienced healthy communities projects who are interested in receiving in-depth guidance and feedback to make their work more successful. Our model is to work closely with the project team to understand and clarify the needs and what they want to accomplish. Then we jointly develop and implement a plan for providing the needed technical assistance.

We created this program to provide technical assistance to individuals and organizations doing healthy communities work across the state. In almost all communities, there are dedicated individuals representing a variety of sectors who understand their communities and the need to collaborate with other sectors to make their communities better places to live, but face a variety of challenges, including: limited skills in working in a collaborative practice, limited relationships with individuals working in other sectors, lack of resources and understanding how existing resources might be accessed for a project. We believe that with technical assistance to address these issues, collaborations can be established, projects developed, and communities can thrive.