Building a Healthier Community through Conversation: The Oxford County Wellness Collaborative

Essential to MeHAF’s Healthy Community philosophy is to encourage communities to determine what they want to achieve, what they already have in place, what system barriers exist that they can collectively address without creating new programs or services, and what they need to create. The goal is to seed multiple aligned strategies and encourage diverse community stakeholders to tap into their area of passion.

MeHAF gave Healthy Community grantees the freedom to design a process that best suited their community context, assets, and needs. This case study tells the story of how one county employed a community conversation approach to gather information from a broad array of stakeholders to reach consensus on its priority health issue: social isolation and disconnection.