About us
What is Healthier Together?
Healthier Together began as a community-led solution to improve health disparities in diabetes, behavioral health and family caregiving in six Palm Beach County, Florida communities.
Launched by Palm Health Foundation in 2014, Healthier Together puts residents at the core of developing health solutions around their own needs rather than force-fitting a system that doesn’t always recognize the complexity, culture, context and circumstances of diverse communities.
For Palm Health Foundation, Healthier Together represents a departure from traditional responsive grant-making, embracing the social determinants of health to implement a truly resident-led initiative viewed through a health equity lens.
Working with complexity is the new norm for working in human systems. If you are not willing to embrace adaptability, you are doing a disservice to the people you are working with.
Healthier Together generated shifts in the bedrock of Palm Health foundation: from a traditional responsive grant-making mindset to becoming a local steward of shared resources; from investing in systems to investing in residents; and from a learning organization to a learning culture.
It was also a risk, seasoned with doses of conflict, doubt and fear, but it was a risk worth taking.
The foundation is learning how to work in complexity—today’s new norm—and embrace adaptability by listening to the voice of community and recognizing outcomes that value social capital, human capital and developing people’s capacity. Partners have learned along our side, joining us in creating a movement where we share responsibility for seeding, stoking and building a system that will produce better health and well-being for all.
The purpose of our website is to guide communities and organizations seeking to embark on a similar initiative and impart lessons learned from Healthier Together by sharing how to:
- Establish networks focused on health equity, ensuring residents with the greatest disparities are part of the process
- Develop approaches for navigating complexity and emergence and a learning framework to assess progress and impact
- Embrace adaptability and foster outcomes that value social capital, human capital and developing people’s capacity for collaborative leadership
- Encourage local community solutions without traditional constraints, creating a safe-to-fail environment
- Adopt mechanisms for tapping and aligning local assets
For a more in-depth understanding of our work, please download our paper, A Shared Purpose, Transforming Communities Through the Social Determinants of Health.
Thank you for sharing in our journey.
Healthier Together Goals
1
Help narrow health disparities among the residents in Palm Beach County
2
Increase capacity among individuals, organizations and systems to impact lasting and sustainable change related to health and well-being
3
Establish a learning framework to evaluate the overall impact of the Healthier Together initiative as well as the impact at the community level
