U.S. State and Territorial Health Departments Collaborative for Chronic Diseases

CDC's Healthy Communities Program assists in funding and training state and territorial health departments through a 5-year National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion cooperative agreement to promote healthy lifestyles and prevent chronic diseases. The health departments, in turn, provide technical assistance and training on developing and implementing policy, systems, and environmental changes to communities within their jurisdictions to

• Promote physical activity and nutrition.
• Reduce tobacco use and exposure.
• Foster improved and increased access to quality care.
• Help eliminate racial, ethnic, and socio-economic health disparities.
• Reduce complications from and incidence of chronic diseases.
• Build capacity for communities to perform this work.

To enhance local community efforts and maximize the public health impact, health departments identify and leverage opportunities with other health programs in their state or territory that address chronic diseases or related risk factors. Each community will learn more about its state or territorial health department's priority objectives for preventing chronic diseases and strategies for supporting those objectives. In addition, health departments will be developing, implementing, and disseminating mechanisms to facilitate the Collaborative's sharing of best practices, community accomplishments, and lessons learned.

These activities further CDC’s Healthy Communities Program goals by fostering strong partnerships between states and territorial health departments, CDC, and the many communities and partners.

• Communities benefit because this collaboration forges a direct relationship between them and their state or territorial health department staff and provides an additional avenue for technical support, communication, and training.
• Health departments and CDC both benefit from this arrangement through creating and testing innovative health promotion activities, which will result in the documentation of best practices and publication of inspirational stories that will assist other communities in their work.