CTuE1 - Bridging Differences, Shifting Narratives, and Advancing Vital Conditions for Thriving Communities

Session Description: Community health centers (CHCs) play a critical role in fostering health and well-being across the country. In the evolving healthcare landscape, CHCs face the challenge of providing healthcare services while also participating as full partners in community-wide efforts for thriving. To foster thriving communities, we need to build structures and partnerships that will help us move complex systems in new directions. The question is: how do we build bridges and move from “business as usual” to a new future where everyone is thriving with no exceptions?

During this interactive workshop, The Rippel Foundation’s ReThink Health Initiative, NACHC, Yakima Neighborhood Health Services, and Valley Health Partners will illustrate – and invite dialogue – about how CHCs can play an even more decisive and interdependent role in creating thriving communities. We will introduce the Vital Conditions for Health & Well-being Framework and its role in fostering thriving people and places and will help participants imagine what it takes to create a future of health and well-being in their communities.

We will bring examples from CHCs across the country and share lessons, insights and challenges from their work cultivating vital conditions across their communities and building the will to bring others into working together in new ways.

Through a group table exercise, participants will practice applying the Vital Conditions Framework to their work in order to enhance well-being, strengthen belonging and civic muscle, assure fairness in system design, expand vital conditions, and shift away from an over-reliance on urgent services.