Action Institutes and Training

Coaches Meetings

From each newly selected community, two coaches—one from the local affiliate of the funded partner and one from the community-at-large are provided with training at the Coaches Meetings. Coaches are provided with strategies for building an effective leadership team and coalition and educated on how to lead a community assessment to identify and prioritize areas of improvement. In addition, coaches learn the importance of environmental change strategies for chronic disease prevention and health promotion.

Action Institutes

CDC's Healthy Communities Program Action Institutes train leadership teams from funded communities in how to make health-related environmental changes. These interventions at the local level focus on preventing and controlling chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, obesity, and arthritis and reducing the prevalence of health risk factors, especially tobacco use and exposure, insufficient physical activity, and poor nutrition.

Community leadership teams receive training from innovative national experts on community-action and community-change processes and develop an action plan during the institutes. They also gain access to a wide range of action tools, resources, and strategies and hear from peer communities about how to undertake effective interventions. Team-building opportunities are scheduled to promote further discussion and infrastructure development. This experience advances the team’s collective thinking regarding vision, priorities, and next steps.

All newly selected communities attend an Action Institute in their first year of Pioneering Healthier Communities and ACHIEVE. The Strategic Alliance for Health Action Institute provides training not only to the Strategic Alliance for Health communities, but also to representatives from the U.S. State and Territorial Health Departments Collaborative for Chronic Diseases. Ongoing training is provided by CDC and partners through conference calls, webinars, site visits, and other training meetings each year.