Share Your Community Success Stories

Document your community's policy, systems, and environmental changes by using CDC's new Healthy Communities Program Success Stories Web Site.

Healthy Communities Program Success Stories Web Site

Chronic diseases and conditions, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, obesity, and arthritis are pervasive health problems in the United States, affecting almost 50% of the population and accounting for 7 of the 10 leading causes of death nationally.* Communities across the country are hard at work creating policies to reduce the risk factors related to chronic diseases. To share the impact of creating policies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Healthy Communities Program is pleased to announce the new Success Stories Web Site. By using this Web site, communities can turn their success into strong, professional, and polished documents to share with stakeholders and decision makers. These stories illustrate the real-world impact of implementing policies that sustain environmental and systems changes that address the major risk factors—tobacco, physical inactivity, and unhealthy eating.

Features of the Web Site

This innovative resource is accessible to CDC's Healthy Communities Program grantees, as well as the public and includes a number of helpful features to users—

• Easy-to-use tool to develop your story.
• Guidance on how to write a success story.
• A downloadable worksheet to begin the pre-writing process.
• Three professionally developed templates to share with your stakeholders.
• A free photo library.
• Archive of success stories that you can search and share.

CDC's Healthy Communities Program

CDC's Healthy Communities Program is working to reduce risk factors related to chronic disease while promoting health equity in communities throughout the country. Through this effort, community coalitions are able to develop and promote policies to make sustainable changes to local systems and environments. These changes, in turn, help to address major health risk factors—tobacco, physical inactivity, and unhealthful eating. To date, the program has funded 306 communities and 50 state health departments through Strategic Alliance for Health (SAH), ACHIEVE, Pioneering Healthier Communities (PHC), Steps, and the U.S. State and Territorial Health Collaborative.

*CDC's Healthy Communites Preventing Chronic Disease by Activating Grassroots Changes .

More Information

• CDC's Healthy Communities Program Success Stories Web Site
• CDC's Healthy Communities Program