If you have been reading this paper, you know what the Way to Wellville is: a challenge sponsored by the Health Initiative Coordinating Council (HICCup) in which five communities have five years to make meaningful changes to personal, social and economic health. What you might not know is that other organizations are rallying around the Way to Wellville, which is building momentum all over the country.
For example, ReThink Health is an organization with a goal to help overcome the barriers and excuses that stifle creative action, and show communities how to speed up the process of making real change to improve health indicators. ReThink Health received a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for a 12-month project called “Supporting the Way to Wellville — ReThinking Health and Care in Small Communities,” and this year-long effort kicks off Thursday right here in Lake County with a two-day training lab.
The training will cover a variety of topics including strategic planning, creating stewardship teams and developing sustainable financing for health-based activities. Participants will receive dedicated coaching and will use the ReThink Health “Our Town” Model, a virtual tool created for Wellville that simulates the behavior of regional health systems that can be customized based on each community’s characteristics and needs.
Lake County is thrilled to host the ReThink Health training lab, and honored to welcome representatives from the other four Wellville communities: Clatsop County, Oregon; Greater Muskegon, Michigan; Niagara Falls, New York, and Spartanburg, South Carolina. This is the first time that people from all five Wellville communities will be together in one location since being selected to participate in the Way to Wellville Challenge last August. Members of the HICCup team will also be in attendance.
“It will be really helpful to get some perspective on what we’re doing and how we can do it better,” North Coast Opportunities Executive Director Patty Bruder said. “ReThink Health wouldn’t have come to Lake County if we weren’t one of the Wellville Five, so this training is a tangible benefit of the Wellville Challenge.”
ReThink Health is just one of many organizations that are actively engaging with the Wellville Challenge. Representatives from IBM and the California Health Care Foundation will also attend the two-day training, and will provide information on specific initiatives they are involved with to support the Wellville effort. (More on those projects in the weeks and months to come.)
The ReThink Health training is being held at and catered by the Lodge at Blue Lakes. Check back next week for a recap of how this groundbreaking two-day training lab went.
