Community Health

Community Health, the Winter Park Health Foundation’s (WPHF) newest focus area, represents the Foundation’s efforts to improve the health of the community by focusing on the ways it can support healthy behaviors where we live, work and play by making changes to the physical and social environment.

The efforts were inspired by the book, “Prescription for a Healthy Nation, A New Approach to Improving Our Lives by Fixing Our Everyday World,” which recognizes how behaviors like overeating and failure to exercise are influenced by the structure of the everyday world, which can either support or stymie a healthy lifestyle.

The overall goal of the focus area is to enhance the health for people of all ages through active support and thoughtful creation, implementation and evaluation of policies, practices and programs that focus on community health improvement.

Its objectives are:

• To Foster Health-Promoting Policies and Partnerships
• To Foster Healthy Places
• To Foster Healthy Behaviors

As it works to support and encourage healthy behaviors, the Community Health Work Group (CHWG) has provided grant support for variety of programs and projects including the recently completed Faith Community Nursing (FCN) initiative which also received grant funding from the Older Adults Work Group.

FCN was an effort to support the development of health programs in faith community settings and to inspire faith communities to include health in their mission and work. The initiative was overseen by Florida Hospital’s Healthy 100 Church Ministry staff members who provided training and support to the five faith community nurses working at churches in Winter Park, Maitland and Eatonville.

Mindful of the importance of providing education on important health issues, the CHWG, continues to help support a series of educational briefs focused on proposed changes to Florida’s Medicaid program, in collaboration with the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. The briefs were authored by the Georgetown Health Policy Institute and are designed to help educate and inform consumers, stakeholders and policy-makers on the issues involved in Medicaid reform.

To help insure a safer environment for bikers and walkers, the CHWG continues to support Bike/Walk Central Florida (BWCF) and its successful Best Foot Forward pedestrian safety campaign.

One of the work group’s latest grants supports the creation of a mobile farmer’s market. Hebni Nutrition Consultants requested the grant to help convert a city bus into a refrigerated mobile grocery store to take food to low-income areas where residents have no access to fresh fruit and vegetables.

It also is providing a grant to the Health Council of East Central Florida (HCECF), to support the development of a web-based resource for Health Impact Assessment (HIA) practitioners and to conduct an HIA of the Parramore community in Orlando. The HIA is a process that can be used to help evaluate the potential health effects of a plan, project or policy before it is built or implemented.