Community Voices brings together Mayors, Commissioners to Advance Health / by Starla Blanks

The Community Voices Division of the Satcher Health Leadership Institute launched the Healthy Communities Initiative on Monday June 16th and will continue through Friday June 23rd.

The Healthy Communities Initiative (HCI) is designed to close the gap between academic medicine or academic health centers and communities of greatest need by connecting to people who are most affected by disparities. The HCI is designed to mobilize and engage mayors, county officials, other elected officials and their teams by enhancing their health leadership skills, providing community health resources, and motivating leaders to influence policies and implement health projects that will eliminate health disparities. This program will provide an opportunity for in-depth engagement in exploring panoply of topics that will give participants concrete tools to enable effective engagement of multidisciplinary sectors, and resources required to improve health and community well-being. The attendees for this executive cohort range from mayors representing small cities across the east coast to County Commissioners from mid-sized jurisdictions in the mid-west and community stakeholders who represent public health departments and community organizations who work on policy, programming and services in their local communities.  This event is being sponsored by Morehouse School of Medicine, World Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities and the National Association of Black County Elected Officials through the generous support of the Kresge Foundation.