The Colorado Healthy Communities Initiative Lab Report

The Colorado Healthy Communities Initiative - Lab Report Example This uniqueness of this program that differentiates it from others is that it focused on the community based definition of health that means it gave a personal touch to it. The second important thing that was introduced was collaboration between those different individuals of the society to work for a common purpose. It helped an individual to build its own individual capacity. The involvement of different kinds of communities prevailing in that state was evident too. This study was conducted over a period of 8 years and extensive exploration took place in these years that have validated the research as being fruitful and a true representative of the thoughts of the common man living in Colorado about his health. It involved extensive evaluation of all the processes and steps that were involved in the process to understand the diversity of the individuals and implementing the health conscious techniques according to the individual's diverse background and value system. Four evaluatio n reports were produced through this program. These reports were the highlights of the program and the article is based on the important findings of those four reports only. The findings of this study were worth mentioning. The less participation on the part of the Coloradoan citizens in the decision making process that determines their future was reported. The citizens felt they weren't being given enough opportunities to foster participation. Another factor that was revealed through this study was the Coloradoan citizen's love, affection and sense of belonging with the state and the people of that state, the neighborhood and the government. A further astonishing finding was that they considered the local government more powerful and important than the overall government. They gave more weight to the local government as to solving their problems. Another thing that they believed strongly in was that the adult participation and prevention as being the two most effective ways of solving problems. The CHCI model was adapted from the National Civil League's approach to healthy community. It consisted of two phases; the first one was of 18 months of extensive strategic planning, the second phase consisted of 2 to 3 years of action-oriented implementation activities. The final step in the planning process was by the stakeholders to develop activities and plans to address to the issue. The stakeholder's could then apply for implementation grants and use those grants accordingly to the benefit of their respective communities. In addition to all this, a community indicators project was also initiated in the middle stages. The Colorado trust made additional funds to be made available to 15 other communities and this act turned out to be pretty fruitful. Evaluation The major outcomes from this initiative were that there was a lot of commitment shown on the part of the citizens of that state. They were a diverse group of people varying from the business to the education sector. The commitment and collaboration yielded from issue-focused outcomes to the creation of a new family based nonprofit resource