Everything Old Will be New Again
By Nancy Baughman Csuti, The Colorado Trust
In the movie All That Jazz, one of the most memorable songs is “Everything Old Will be New Again.” That was certainly the case at the National Civic League’s All-America City Awards held in Denver June 13-15. The conference focused on healthy-community efforts, and attendees converged in Denver from across the country to share their city’s successes and compete for the “All-America City” designation. According to the National Civic League, the criteria for winning an All-America City Award included impact, inclusiveness, public engagement and collaboration among the city’s private, public and nonprofit sectors.
I was honored to introduce a session at the conference featuring former Colorado Trust staff member Doug Easterling, who presented on the Colorado Healthy Communities Initiative (CHCI). (View presentation slides.) This initiative, which ran from 1992-2000, may be “old,” but the lessons learned from it were new for many of the attendees.
The “healthy communities” movement, started by the World Health Organization in the mid 1980s, was brought to Colorado by The Colorado Trust in the early 1990s. Healthy communities is based on the premise that the health of a community’s residents will improve only when the community takes the initiative to identify problems and develop and implement locally relevant plans to solve them. This approach to community problem-solving requires residents – those with crucial knowledge of the community, its history and culture – to be involved in all aspects of this work.
Easterling was key to helping shape the CHCI strategy and led the evaluation efforts. He presented a few of the lessons learned from this early work – lessons that have played out in numerous relevant efforts in the decades since The Trust’s project. Key lessons (and surprises) included the fact that CHCI triggered long-term planning, community-problem solving and civic infrastructure investment long after the funding ended.
Another lesson was the highest impact projects were generally not the ones communities initially planned to undertake. While initial plans may have included specific programs to improve health, many solutions focused on other community needs, including regional transportation, health insurance and assisted-living facilities.
Now, 22 years after CHCI’s inception, The Trust is once again partnering with Colorado communities to generate solutions. With our “new” community-based participatory grantmaking efforts, we will take the lessons from CHCI – lessons that have informed two decades of community initiatives and place-based grantmaking across the country – and, building on that strong legacy, work with communities to achieve health equity.
As the song in All That Jazz goes, everything old will be new again. And thanks to the lessons of those Colorado communities that tackled this decades ago, everything has the potential to be better than ever.
