Achieving Healthy, Resilient and Thriving Communities
The CDC Foundation believes we have more impact working together and is committed to supporting and working with communities to eliminate health inequities in rural, frontier and urban areas. Public health’s mission is to promote safer, healthier, and better-quality lives, prevent disease and injury, and ensure all individuals have the right to access all the facts, information, and knowledge available to make healthy choices for themselves, their families, and their community.
By joining with communities of all shapes and sizes, as well as public health, private sector, philanthropic and community partners, we aim to improve health for all and realize our vision of vibrant and resilient communities where everyone can thrive and live their healthiest lives.
Ensuring Everyone Has the Opportunity to Be Healthy
We all want our families to live their healthiest lives. Yet we all do not have the same opportunities to make this a reality.
Having an open green space for play and recreation close to our home, a well-stocked grocery store that is easily accessible, clean drinking water available through our kitchen faucet, clean air in our neighborhood and safe sidewalks to take evening walks can improve our everyday lives and routines—and our health. However, access to these resources are affected by economic factors, laws and systems that make health opportunities uneven for some communities.
People’s ability to make healthy choices are also affected by economic factors impacting communities and certain policies, laws and systems that make health opportunities uneven. Across our national and global projects and in partnership with communities, the CDC Foundation works to improve health outcomes. Together, we can reinvent our policies and practices so everyone can reach a better quality of life.
Our collective future depends on all of our communities having an equitable opportunity for health, wellbeing and economic vitality.
More Impact Working Together
We all make health-related choices everyday—what food to eat for breakfast, if we should exercise, going to see our doctor regularly. We make these choices within the options available to us. Building equitable health opportunities requires a focus on the systems we have in place within our communities to ensure we all have opportunities to make choices to protect and promote our health.
Examining systems—such as our policies and practices, our regulations, how we collect data within our communities and how we communicate about public health opportunities—enables us to create long-term changes and improve the health of our communities.
By examining systems, we address health inequities at their root causes. In this approach, we work through cross-sector partnerships, including with community organizations, to build sustainable solutions.