When Jon Ford travels the state talking to groups about wellness, he asks people the first word that comes to mind when he says “health.”
“Every single time it’s doctors, medicine, hospitals,” says Ford, director of strategic initiatives at Vitalyst Health Foundation, a statewide advocacy organization. After that, “it’s always ‘Well, I should lose weight and exercise more.’ This is the default frame that we have in America, that health is either ‘health care,’ or ‘It’s my fault.’”
Vitalyst aims to change that through partnerships with businesses, nonprofits and communities to address the social determinants of health – everything except health care, like housing, walkability, air quality, education and socioeconomics – and take action. Vitalyst adopted the World Health Organization’s elements of a healthy community and localized them using feedback from constituents.
“We gave all of that input to a designer, and the designer came up with the wheel,” Ford says. “Every individual in Arizona should consider this model and understand they need to have a broader perspective about what their community does or does not do for them.”
