Overview: "Healthy People in Healthy Communities" is the theme for the Year 2000 release of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Healthy People 2010. Key goals are: 1) increase years of healthy life and 2) eliminate health disparity. Goals address healthy behavior, health care access, and community-wide prevention.

How Wellness Works: Wellness can build awareness of the relationship between environmental support and individual responsibility for health. Activities include:

• set up and train a wellness team that includes and represents diverse views,
• survey health risks and potential costs,
• create space to post information,
• create constructive ways to deal with loss, powerlessness, helplessness, anxiety, and rite-of-passage marking,
• create opportunities to develop life skills--stress management, resistance/ refusal, risk-reduction, and other skills,
• reduce environmental stress, and
• reward healthy choices.

The Payoff: The health of an organization is linked to the health of its people. Organizations and communities can provide structures that help people pursue healthful, satisfying lives. Employers can reduce key health costs such as chronic disease, HIV, substance abuse, and mental health.

How to Make It Happen: Organizational wellness is self-managed and supported by facilitators experienced with:

• cultural audit and electronic surveys,
• future vision and planning,
• workforce training and development,
• team and organizational learning.

Cultural support for wellness principles can also include external systems, such as media, family, school, hospital, and social and public services.

Bernard, B., "An Overview of Community-Based Prevention," Prevention Research Findings: 1988.

Knight, E.A., Johnson, H.H., Holbert, D., "Analysis of the Competent Community: Support for the Community Organization: Role of the Health Educator," Internat'l. Qtrly. of Community Health Educ., 1991, 11 (2), 145-154.

National Wellness Institute, Inc., "Work Progresses on Developing the Nation's Health Promotion Agenda …" Health Issues Update, Winter 1997-98.

Ray, M., & Rinzler, A., (1993), The New Paradigm in Business: Emerging Strategies for Leadership and …Change, Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy Tacher, Inc.