collage-home

About the Project

How can we all achieve a healthy life? What will it take for all Oregonians to be able to live in environments that sustain us and promote our well-being — where we can all breathe clean air, drink pure water and eat nourishing food — and where it’s safe for each and every one of us to walk or ride a bike? What must we do for good preventive care to be available to everyone in all corners of the state?

Community Health Priorities (CHP) is a project of the Northwest Health Foundation, based on work completed in partnership with the Oregon Public Health Division and the Oregon Health Policy Commission. Our goal is to engage people all over the state to articulate a vision of a healthier life for everyone, and then develop policies that help us achieve that vision.

CHP is dedicated to the following beliefs:

•  It’s easier for individuals to make healthy choices when the community makes it possible for those choices to happen.

•  Public health programs work. They’re based on scientific evidence, and are an efficient investment in public funds. The more we spend on public health programs now, the less we will require in expensive medical care downstream.

•  Public policy is the expression of community will. When the public is unaware of the benefits of public health, the result is inadequate investment.

•  We can do better. Did you know that Oregon currently rank 43rd in the nation in per capita state funding for public health?

•  Communities have to be engaged, but every community is different. Diverse values and demographics among different communities often require different approaches.

Here’s what we seek to accomplish:

•  Stimulate public conversation about health in our communities.

•  Reveal the priorities of Oregonians relating to improving the health of all.

•  Advocate for those priorities articulated by Oregonians.

The project began with a look at the past. Oregon has a rich history of citizen involvement in public health and citizen engagement. The first phase of this project was devoted to understanding where prior public engagement efforts did – and did not – work.

Key_Informant_Lessons_Learned.pdf Learn what we discovered through this process

About this Website

We need your input from you and this website is where it happens. Here you can read and comment on perspectives by guest authors, and submit your own commentary. You can also find tools to help get involved in making positive change in your community.

We recognize that this way of thinking about health is not new or unique. Other people, communities, and projects in Oregon and all over the world are thinking about the health the way we do. Another goal for this site is to share these perspectives with each other, and to continue the process of getting us all to re-think and re-prioritize health for everybody.

Disclaimer

Disclaimer: Community Health Priorities believes that community conversation is an effective way to enable progressive policy change. However, while we encourage open dialogue throughout this website, we also have to stay committed to advocating for public policies that promote and encourage healthy behavior. While criticism of Community Health Priorities, or its partners, or of specific public health policies, is welcome, we reserve the right to close down discussions or posts that stray too far from our core themes and discussion topics