July 2016
Transforming Communities
With the rise in preventable disease both nationally and globally, communities are increasingly seen as the epicenter for sustainable solutions. There is an increased focus on communities to be the architects of health improvement. This trend towards community transformation speaks to the realization that health is local and that communities are best able to develop strategies that are appropriate for their region and population. A healthy community is good for the local economy and adds to the viability of the region and the country on a whole.
But what does it take for a community to go through a health transformation? What does a transformed community look like? The answers to these questions are as complex as the health indicators that communities are trying to improve. The Clinton Health Matters (CHMI), an initiative of the Clinton Foundation, understands these complexities and works with communities to develop strategies to address health improvement across all generations. CHMI recognizes that communities are at the nexus of health innovation and believes that systems change lays the groundwork for overall health improvement. We guide communities to make decisions based on current data with a collective focus on priority issues.
Reimagining Health
Health needs to be viewed as more than just a physical state. It is important to help communities and organizations set a bold vision for health improvement that transcends the individual without losing sight of unique and precise needs. Achieving health equity is CHMI’s ultimate goal which requires addressing population or systemic needs along with, or even sometimes paramount, to singularly held goals. The social determinants of health suggest that there are a myriad of factors that impact an individual’s health and well-being. Factors like the environment, access to and quality of healthy foods, healthcare and availability of physical activity spaces all contribute to overall good health and impact a community. Issues of health equity, access, and quality of care are also central to this. CHMI’s Community Health Transformation (CHT) model works as a neutral convener in communities to facilitate this process.
Partnerships with Purpose
When examining the compendium of factors, it is important to understand that it will take a diverse set of stakeholders to address and set about developing appropriate solutions. Specifically, a set of “unlikely partners” that can provide human capital and expertise to create “partnerships with purpose.” Engaging diverse stakeholders to form a consensus around improving health is the key ingredients of a rich partnership that can providing lasting results. A collaborative that can collectively develop health improvement strategies that are sustainable and feasible ensures greater success. CHMI believes that systems strengthening is also vital to long lasting and scalable solutions. Commitments are generally stronger where partnerships exist. CHMI’s CHT program currently works in 6 communities addressing chronic disease and convening stakeholders to develop health improvement frameworks called Blueprints for Action. This systems-change approach is not only used at the community level, but also at the national and institutional level.
Collective Impact (Action)
The greatest impact can happen when there is collective action around specific goals. For instance, in many of CHMI’s CHT communities, stakeholders achieve a consensus on specific goals known as bold actions. By collectively planning, developing, implementing, and sustaining efforts, lasting effects can be achieved.
For instance, in Coachella Valley, the community saw the need for universal HIV testing and with help from a local healthcare system, the community has been able to surpass the CDC’s recommended percentage of residents to be tested for HIV. In Houston, the use of technology is helping to lower the incidence of non-emergency cases overcrowding emergency rooms.
In some cases, doing an environmental scan can yield valuable information that is helpful to a community and allows them to make informed decision. Such an example can be seen in a collaboration between CHMI and the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO). These organizations surveyed employers to understand their motivation to be involved in wellness initiatives that benefit their employees.
CHMI knows that engaging stakeholders who have the capacity to influence health outcomes into a consensus driven process will enhance the collective consciousness. When you further underscore that momentum with data-driven decision making and the curation of best practices and resources to make changes possible, you ultimately harness a community-wide desire to live healthier for maximum impact.
Gillian Sealy is the National Director of the Clinton Health Matters Initiative. Gillian leads a team of regional directors working with communities to improve the health and wellbeing of all residents by reducing the prevalence of preventable health outcomes, closing health inequity and disparity gaps and reducing healthcare costs.
April 2016
When the La Crosse Medical Health Science Consortium first began considering how to improve the health of our community, one of the first tools we turned to was the health model developed by the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute. With an initial goal of making our county the healthiest in the state, we looked to the model to see where we could have the most impact.
In this model, four Health Factors determine what influences health most: Clinical Care, Health Behaviors, Social & Economic Factors, and Physical Environment. In the early stages of developing a plan for a healthier county, we chose to focus specifically on Health Behaviors—diet, physical activity, tobacco use, alcohol use, etc. With so many organizations and services in our community focused on health behaviors, we worked to align the efforts of many local organizations with the goal of improving our ranking through a common health improvement plan.
Similarly, workplaces seeking to improve the health of their employees often focus on influencing the individual behaviors of each worker through incentives for developing healthier habits, smoking cessation programs, and on-site health screenings and farmers markets. All of these offer opportunities for employees to improve their own health, and thus the productivity and efficiency of their employer.
But, as the model shows, health behaviors only account for 30% of our health, and if we do not consider the impact of the remaining factors, we are not seeing the complete picture of what good health can be.
As our work at the Consortium developed, we began to look more carefully at health equity—the idea of all people having an equal opportunity for good health. It was through this lens that we came to see the value of revisiting other aspects of the health model. If we were to impact health behaviors for all individuals, we had to understand the context in which health-related decisions were made and the disparities therein.
Socioeconomic and physical environment factors, such as housing quality, access to transportation, education level, income status, and social support, together determine 50% of our health. These factors explain the conditions in which health behaviors occur. For example, the decision to eat a healthy diet can be more difficult to sustain for an individual living in a food desert. Likewise, choosing to be more physically active can be harder for someone living in an unsafe neighborhood with no recreational opportunities nearby.
Employers have an obvious and direct influence on their employees’ socioeconomic status simply by providing a job and a source of income, but their influence can also reach much more deeply. It is by impacting health at its roots that an employer seeking a healthier workforce will find some of the greatest opportunities.
Investing in the education of employees, for example, through job training, professional development, skill-building, and leadership development, can create opportunities not only for developing better job skills but also for higher levels of performance and engagement. Can partnerships with local educational institutions lead to improvement opportunities for your employees?
Access to safe, reliable transportation has a very direct impact on an employee’s productivity and level of success. What opportunities does your business have for helping employees access reliable transportation?
Many employers draw their workforce from a wide area surrounding their physical location, yet most businesses also exist within a neighborhood or community themselves. Employers that see themselves as good neighbors and who invest in the success of their neighbors—regardless of where they work—adds to the overall sense of community. A sense of belonging, or sense of community, is one of the key measures set by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as an important component of a community’s “Culture of Health”.
In La Crosse, Wisconsin, area employers such as Viterbo University, Mayo Clinic Health System-Franciscan Healthcare, and Gundersen Health System have directly invested in the neighborhoods immediately surrounding their campuses, providing locations for neighborhood-based social workers and community police, supporting community gardens, helping to develop neighborhood improvement plans, contributing to housing improvements, and incentivizing their employees to live in nearby neighborhoods.
Having a sense of community between an employer and its physical neighbors allows the values of the employer to be carried throughout the community, both internally and externally. This builds another important component of aspects of good health—social support. How might your organization be a better neighbor, and how might you engage your workers in supporting your local neighborhood?
Employers who consider the context of their employees’ lives—the needs of their families, their homes, and their neighborhoods—may find surprising opportunities to indirectly impact the health and well-being of their workforce.
Health is more than just a group of behaviors and choices made by individuals. It is an outcome of many factors, some of which do not seem directly linked to health. By investing in your workforce both directly, through support for healthy decision-making, and indirectly, by improving the conditions in which your workers live, work, and play, employers can play an important role in building a strong foundation for health. How will you influence your workers’ health today?
Catherine Kolkmeier is the Director of the La Crosse Medical Health Science Consortium in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The Consortium is a partnership of two major medical centers, three schools of higher education, a school district, and a county health department. It is dedicated to fostering collaboration for healthier communities by improving population health and strengthening the healthcare workforce.
February 2016
How Employers Can Support and Promote Healthy Communities
There is an inextricable link between health, income and education.
In general, the more education you have, the more income you’ll earn over your lifetime and higher education can translate into better health. According to the Robert Wood John Foundation’s (RWJF) Commission to Build a Healthier America, “25-year-old college graduates, on average, live eight to nine years longer than people who have not completed high school. And the contrast is not just between the extremes—they can also expect to live two to four years longer than their counterparts who have attended but not completed college.”
What Determines Our Health?
So, where should we direct our focus? It turns out that our health is mostly determined by our behavior and environment. According to the RWJF and University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute,
- 40 percent of our health status is determined by our education, employment, income, family and social support and community safety,
- 30 percent of our health status is determined by our health behaviors, such as our tobacco use, diet and exercise, alcohol and drug use, and sexual activity, and
- 10 percent of our health status is determined by our air and water quality, housing and transit.
That means that only 20 percent of our health status is determined by our clinical care—in terms of access to care and quality of care. While this statistic may be surprisingly low, it does not trivialize the importance of medical care. Clearly, living in a healthy neighborhood is no consolation if you are sick and your illness could bankrupt your family financially, physically and/or mentally.
Location, Location, Location
What is crucially important to recognize is the extent to which ZIP codes matter. Our ZIP code tends to be a more accurate predictor of how long we live than our genetic code. As shown in the map of New Orleans, babies born in a neighborhood not far from the French Quarter can be expected to live, on average, until the age of 55, while babies born a few miles northwest, in a suburban Lakeview neighborhood, can be expected to live up to a generation longer, until the age of 80.
This pattern is not unique to New Orleans. It is a pattern seen in communities across the country.
ZIP CODE MATTERS
Source: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America, . These data points are life expectancy at birth. Information prepared by Woolf et al., Center on Human Needs, Virginia Commonwealth University using Evans BF, Zimmerman E, Woolf SH, Haley AD. Social Determinants of Health and Crime in Post-Katrina Orleans Parish: Technical Report. Richmond, VA: Virginia Commonwealth University Center on Human Needs; 2012.
What Works
There are a number of organizations working with communities that are struggling with their health, income and education. Their investments and activities include:
- building housing that is affordable to low-income households;
- financing charter schools, child care centers, community centers, grocery stores, health clinics and other community facilities;
- providing training and small-dollar loans to entrepreneurs who are not yet creditworthy to access mainstream bank products and services; and,
- helping people build and repair their credit and access quality financial products and services.
All sectors—nonprofit, for-profit and public—and all disciplines—medical and nonmedical—must work together to build a culture of health. “Healthy” can become the norm when we design our environments—where we live, learn, work and play—to make “healthy” the easy and attractive choice.
Employers have an important role to play in this endeavor, and it extends beyond their four walls.
How Employers Can Support and Promote Healthy Communities
- Prepare your story by putting it in a “healthy communities” perspective. Describe the complex link between education, income and health; explain why ZIP codes matter; illustrate how your work supports or promotes healthy communities; and highlight the economic, financial, social and environmental value of your work.
- Reach out to organizations that focus on components of healthy communities that you’d like to learn more about; learn their goals, successes and challenges; identify their community and economic development activities and geographic markets; ask them about community collaborations that they’d recommend you join; and invite them to participate in your community collaborations. Consider bringing your top staff from government relations, market research, marketing, public relations, human resources, etc., so that they can share their expertise and learn others’ perspectives.Below is a list of the components of healthy communities. All are integral to healthy, vibrant and resilient communities. A list of experts for each component is in the Appendix of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ publication Healthy Communities: A Framework for Meeting Community Reinvestment Act Obligations.
Healthy Communities Components
- Access to healthy food
- Access to medical care
- Aesthetics: clean and well-maintained environment, landscaping, art, culture
- Air, soil and water quality
- Building financial capacity: financial literacy training, quality financial services and/or products that build/maintain assets
- Built environment (complete streets, housing, schools and workplaces, parks and playgrounds, pedestrian walkways and bike trails, brownfields and open spaces)
- Early childhood development: education, care
- Education
- Employment, creating and retaining jobs, job training
- Entrepreneurship
- Personal/public safety
- Physical activity
- Public transportation, including transit-oriented development
- Senior needs: accommodation, care, services
- Social networks/social environment, democracy-building, community engagement
- Social services
- As you decide how to address health and well-being issues, engage community entities and residents. Residents can tell you what will work, what won’t and what kind of change is valuable and meaningful to them.
- Use your expertise to promote a culture of health. Write an op-ed piece in the local newspaper, share your research findings in public forums (e.g., with the city council), or sit on boards of nonprofits that address one or more healthy communities components.
- Consider your own strategy for cultivating a culture of health.
- Do you promote a family-friendly workplace culture?
- Do you consciously try to reduce stress in the workplace, such as by enabling employees to feel empowered to make important decisions?
- Are most of the food and beverages in your cafeteria, vending machines and at meetings nutritious?
- Do you promote physical activity, such as by making your stairwells attractive and providing exercise classes on-premises?
- Define success not only as learning what works but learning what doesn’t work. Reward partners for sharing these learnings and incorporate these learnings into the feedback loop. This process of continual improvement is vital to creating a culture of health.
Elizabeth Sobel Blum is a senior community development advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. The views expressed in this blog posting are hers and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System. Data and facts cited in this blog posting are compiled from public and private sources deemed reliable at the time of publication.
January 2016
Thanks to Richard Scott, Sarah Urtel and Laura Dimler for sharing their insights on All’s Well Waconia. Visit the HWHC YouTube channel to watch the video clips of their interviews.
“Working together through All’s Well Waconia has improved the quality of life in our community,” explained Richard Scott, director, grants and development for Waconia School District #110. “It’s improved what I like to call, the ‘joy factor.’”
There’s good reason to celebrate the progress made by the All’s Well Waconia collaboration. Since it launched in Waconia, Minn., in September 2013, organizers and volunteers describe a community where more people are eating healthier and locally, and where young people have more opportunities to be active. Perhaps most important are the deepening relationships driving the effort.
“We are fortunate to have many community members who are passionate and committed to building a healthier Waconia,” said Sarah Urtel, executive director of strategy and organizational effectiveness for Ridgeview Medical Center. “We’ve created this opportunity for people to come together and share expertise and collaborate where we have similar interests and enthusiasm.”
Urtel explained one of the many reasons for the success of All’s Well Waconia. “We don’t just focus on health care. Schools, large and small businesses, city officials – we make sure we have broad representation and involvement across the community.”
Leaders have focused their initial energy on two big priorities: healthy eating and active living. Their strategies include:
- supporting healthy eating in schools,
- making healthy eating easier and more convenient across the community,
- empowering youth to be more active through programming and mentoring, and
- improving infrastructure and buildings to support a more active life.
Laura Dimler is an organic CSA (community supported agriculture) farmer and owner of Pampered Pumpkin. She calls All’s Well Waconia “my support system” and acknowledges that building a culture of healthy eating doesn’t happen overnight.
“It’s a process of education and implementation – expanding people’s palates and learning to eat seasonally,” Dimler said. “Local is clearly far better, even from a taste perspective. Even kids like the vegetables we grow.”
What can other communities learn from All’s Well Waconia?
Scott recommends that collaborations start by identifying what’s already working in the community. “Honor what people bring to the table, and build on that. We’re not about reinventing the wheel.”
The new FIERCE program for boys (Fortitude, Integrity, Endurance, Responsibility, Courage, Energetic) is a good example. FIERCE is modeled on Waconia’s already successful More Than Pink program that is designed to empower girls. Both efforts support the All’s Well Waconia goal of increasing opportunities for active living among youth.
Urtel offers similar advice: “Don’t feel like you have to be an expert in health or wellness. Acknowledge where you’re strong, and look for others to complement your strengths, interest and passion.”
This openness to new ideas and contributors has fueled a string of healthy successes for All’s Well Waconia. In local schools, meals are now almost entirely scratch-made, with mostly organic ingredients from local farmers like Dimler. Students do double-duty as school gardeners and enthusiastic taste testers. And a new pasta maker, made possible through a grant from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, enables the district to use local ingredients to make healthy and tasty pasta for all its students.
Maintaining momentum
Maintaining energy and momentum in community collaborations can be challenging, especially in the early stages. But that’s where ownership comes in.
“We all own this,” said Urtel. “We’re all a part of the community and own the success and the learnings from our efforts.”
Scott acknowledges that it’s important to keep celebrating successes – even the small steps – along the way. “We need motivation and encouragement to take what we’re doing to the next level.”
An important next step is measuring progress and outcomes. All’s Well Waconia hopes to partner with the SEARCH Institute for ongoing program evaluation, and conducting a comprehensive community assessment around 40 assets that impact community health.
“We’re committed for the long-term,” said Scott. “By working together, Waconia will become a safer, healthier, happier place to live.”
Several years ago, one of Prevention Partners’ board members grabbed my attention when he told a story describing why he and a few other visionary leaders in his county cared about the health of their community members, outside of just the four walls of their respective businesses. He explained that it cost 5 cents more per can to manufacture soup at a local Campbell’s Soup factory in comparison to other Campbell’s locations because of the poor health and related health care expenses of the employees in that facility. New businesses didn’t want to relocate to his county because of the high rates of obesity and chronic disease, linking poor health to the economic development (or lack thereof) of the county.
It wasn’t enough to focus on the health and health care costs of his own employees alone, because with the general churn of employment in the county, his employees today might not be his employees tomorrow, and he already saw the overweight and obesity rates of middle and high schools students painting a picture of his future employees’ health care costs. However, with enough business leaders in one community committed to improving the health of their employees and focused on a common set of goals and measures, he believed that workplace health would collectively lead to community health.
Since the first time I heard the Campbell’s Soup story, I’ve worked alongside groups of business leaders in several communities who have come to the same conclusion.
- In Salisbury, North Carolina, a community collaboration led by Novant Health Rowan Medical Center, the local Chamber of Commerce, the YMCA, and NovoNordisk led 12 organizations (representing nearly 8,000 employees), including the community college, county and municipal government, accounting, banking, and manufacturing companies, to support the health of their employees by collectively improving policies, benefits, and environments that help make the healthy choice the easy choice at work. The president of the hospital was also the chair of the board for the local Chamber of Commerce, making the hospital a natural and trusted leader in the business community. At the end of the three-year initiative, Partners in Learning (PIL), a child care facility, found that 6 out of 11 employees who used to have high blood sugar were no longer at risk. PIL also cut employee obesity and hypertension rates in half, and helped 4 out of 5 smokers quit over a two-year period.
Deborah Howell, assistant director of PIL added, “Our staff efforts trickle down to our children, resulting in healthier eating, more physical activity and overall better health for the children in our facility.”
- In Greenville, North Carolina, a similar collaboration between Vidant Health System, FirstCarolinaCare Insurance Company, and MedCost Benefit Services led 12 multi-sector businesses to improve healthy workplace practices impacting over 16,000 employees. After four years of work, the city of Greenville decreased their medical costs by 14 percent, lowered ER utilization by nine percent, and successfully engaged 45 percent of employees who needed assistance (as identified by their health insurer). Vidant Health has recently expanded its support and leadership to three local school districts to improve policies and environments to increase physical activity and healthy eating for students.
- The Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust is also helping to kick start and spread initiatives like this across rural North Carolina communities. Currently in Halifax and Rockingham counties, business leaders are partnering with public health to actively recruit 50 organizations in each county to commit to working together over the next two years to establish healthy workplaces across the community.
In order to coordinate, increase the momentum, and spread the great work happening in pockets of North Carolina into new communities across the state, a statewide partnership called Healthy Together NC was launched in 2014. Led by Prevention Partners, the North Carolina Department of Commerce, North Carolina Hospital Association, North Carolina State Health Plan, and Population Health Improvement Partners, Healthy Together NC’s goal is to reach at least 10 of the largest workplaces in each of North Carolina’s 100 counties by 2025 (view our progress here). This reach will change the culture among 1,000+ employers, which means reaching at least 20 percent of the workforce, especially in North Carolina’s rural communities.
So this is a call to action for business leaders, and not just in North Carolina. Improving the health of your employees helps to meet your bottom line. But working together with other local business leaders to improve the health of all of your employees and their families creates a culture of health across your entire community. If you’re not sure how to get started, check out the “Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Communities” case studies of how other businesses, foundations, and coalitions are addressing population health, both in and beyond the workplace setting, to reach employee families and community members.
Whitney Davis is the Director of Research and Evaluation for Prevention Partners, a national nonprofit focused on addressing tobacco use, poor nutrition, physical inactivity, and obesity. Our mission is to engage leaders, transform organizations, and build healthier communities. To learn more about Prevention Partners, visit www.forprevention.org.
How will your organization respond to the call?
The call for healthier communities is gaining steam across the country. From small towns to urban centers in all parts of the United States, leaders are working to improve the health—and the status—of their communities and the people who live and work there.
Recently, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced the winners of its Culture of Health community winners, recognizing eight communities that are making strides toward better health. From building eco-friendly businesses, play areas and walking paths in once abandoned and run-down neighborhoods, to improving financial literacy and bringing accessible health care to the community—these cities are casting a wide net to improve the long-term outlook for their people and their economic future.
While many of these efforts have been led by community and non-profit organizations, business leaders increasingly recognize the connection between a healthy community and a healthy workforce, and are findings ways to lend their leadership and resources to community health improvement.
This shift was underscored at the “Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Communities” Convening Session and through the environmental scan funded by the Institute of Medicine. The convening session also drove home the important message that a common language and set of metrics are needed with which business and community could easily connect and identify.
Over the course of the year, we have been visiting different cities and interviewing community collaborators to find out what they are doing to encourage stakeholder engagement in all sectors. The places we’ve visited ranged in their community-focused efforts from new initiatives to well-established collaboratives, and include:
- Cloud, Minn.
- Waconia, Minn.
- La Crosse, Wis.
- Wausau, Wis.
- State of Oklahoma
- State of South Carolina
- Jacksonville, Fla.
- Nashville, Tenn.
I encourage you to share your story with us, or nominate a featured community.
The call for healthier communities received an additional boost in visibility and prominence in September, when Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on the nation to improve the walkability of our communities, and for individuals to Step It Up! and incorporate more walking into our daily lives. We’d love to hear if your company or community is responding to this call to action and, if so, how?
Remember, by interacting with and using the resources that are available on this website and by sharing your stories, we can all learn together and improve the health of individuals, families and our nation’s current and future workforce. We look forward to hearing from you!
In good health,
Karen Moseley
Project Manager, HWHC
Welcome! This is the inaugural post for the newly launched Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Communities website. This website is devoted to advancing the development of public/private community wide health initiatives by providing resources, examples and insight on the topic. Much of the website content is devoted to employers interested in playing a role in improving the health of communities where their employees live, work, and play, but other stakeholders will find value in the resources and examples as well.
Developed and maintained by HERO, the Health Enhancement Research Organization, and funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this website is part of several HERO-led initiatives, all of which are devoted to identifying the business case for employer engagement in community wide culture of health efforts. This work includes measure identification and development as well.
Cathy Baase: Throughout my career at The Dow Chemical Company, it has been a privilege to work in an organization with such a longstanding focus on health. As the Chief Health Officer and co-owner of our Dow Health Strategy, I have seen much change in the last couple of decades. Our strategy has been successful in demonstrating alignment to corporate priorities, positively impacting the health of our people and bringing value to both Dow and our population. Many years ago, we realized that culture and environment are powerful and must be addressed in our strategy and implementation plans. We then recognized that it is not simply the culture and environment of the company but also that of the community which would drive success. It is great to see the website coming to life as it will be of great benefit to both employers and those community partners seeking to work with them. In 2007, Dow began working with a multi-stakeholder collaborative in the region surrounding our corporate headquarters, the Michigan Health Improvement Alliance which serves 14 counties in central Michigan. Through this effort we have learned much and have realized some positive impact to our corporate health strategy and its targets. I look forward to the shared knowledge that this website will support and the important progress that will occur in the broader employer and societal efforts to advance the health of people.
Nico Pronk: At HealthPartners, a not-for-profit, member-governed, integrated health system headquartered in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, our mission is to “improve health and well-being in partnership with our members, patients, and community.” The Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Communities initiative represents a unique, intentional, positive, and broadly applicable effort to connect business goals with community interests around health and well-being. As the vice president for health management and chief science officer of the organization, my involvement in this project is an easy fit. We have so much to learn from each other in business, across the community, and across multiple sectors. Yet despite a plethora of efforts across many communities in the U.S., few experiences are shared for the benefit of collective learning. This initiative, and in particular this website, is intended to be a resource accessible to all stakeholders and with the goals to share research insights, practical experiences, case examples, as well as opinions and dialogue from users and other interested parties. We have done some initial work to populate the site; however, this work represents only the tip of the proverbial iceberg…additional submissions of the work you are engaged in and continued use of the site will turn this into the rich and meaningful web-based destination it is envisioned to be. I, for one, look forward to the dialogue over the coming years.
Now, we’d love to hear from you. What is the value proposition for employers engaging in these efforts? Tell us what you think!!!
Cathy Baase & Nico Pronk
Co-chairs, HERO Employer-Community Collaboration Committee