Community Development Matters for Health & Well-Being: Key Findings & Case Studies from the Healthy

In 2015, NeighborWorks America, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps Program launched a collaboration designed to help NeighborWorks member organizations develop their own answers to those questions. Along the way, NeighborWorks and our partners hoped to better understand how organizations tackled this question, what it meant for their communities, and how national organizations can support and scale these strategies to meet local needs.

With these goals in mind, our collective effort – known as the Healthy Communities Demonstration Project – supported 28 organizations in rural, urban and suburban communities across the United States. While advancing measurable outcomes was important, we also wanted to build the next generation of leaders and partnerships. Accordingly, we engaged organizations at three different stages in this journey, starting with early efforts where much was unclear and progressing through to mature efforts with partners, systems and metrics in place.