Our History
Healthy Communities Coalition was created in 1995 by a group of concerned citizens whose desire was to keep our kids safe from drugs, alcohol and tobacco, as well as to give a growing population the foundation for developing a community desired by all. Through the last 28 years, HCC has brought to the forefront the reality of poverty and substance use and mental health and has become more than a basic prevention coalition. HCC supports many aspects of building healthy, thriving communities, from general neighborhood strategies to helping our individual communities become healthier by increasing access to health care, including access to mental health services. Our goal is to produce community plans where citizens join with many organizations and sectors to strategize ways to get people out of addiction–not just to ease the symptoms. This is also why HCC adopted a wellness model. Below you will see how SAMHSA?s national prevention initiatives fit with our local wellness model as well and in the plan itself, one will see how we have locally translated these initiatives locally to help promote thriving communities.
SAMHSA Prevention Initiatives
Emotional Wellness
Trauma and Justice ? Reduce the pervasive, harmful, and costly health impact of violence and trauma by integrating trauma-informed approaches throughout health and behavioral health care systems and by diverting people with substance use and mental disorders from criminal and juvenile justice systems into trauma-informed treatment and recovery.
Public Awareness and Support ? increase understanding of mental and substance use disorder prevention and treatment services and activities to achieve the full potential of prevention and assist people in accessing/getting help for these conditions with the same urgency as any other health condition. This also involves strategies for reducing stigma.
Environmental Wellness
Housing and Homelessness ? Provide housing and reduce barriers to accessing effective programs that sustain recovery for individuals with mental and substance use disorders who are homeless.
Intellectual Wellness
Data, Outcomes, and Quality ? Realize an integrated data strategy that informs policy, measures program impact, and results in improved quality of services and outcomes for individuals, families, and communities.
Occupational Wellness
This is not part of national model, but we felt it very important to the overall wellness of our communities and people.
Physical Wellness
Health Care Reform Implementation ? Broaden health coverage to increase access to appropriate high quality care, and to reduce disparities that currently exist between the availability of services for substance abuse, mental disorders, and other medical conditions.
Health Information Technology ? Ensure the behavioral health provider network, including prevention specialists and consumer providers, fully participates with the general health care delivery system in the adoption of Health Information Technology (HIT).
Social Wellness
Prevention of Substance Abuse and Mental Illness ? Create Prevention Prepared Communities where individuals, families, schools, faith-based organizations, workplaces, and communities take action to promote emotional health and reduce the likelihood of mental illness, substance abuse including tobacco, and suicide. This initiative will include a focus on the Nation’s youth, Tribal communities, and military families.
Military Families
Support America’s service men and women ? Active Duty, National Guard, Reserve, and Veterans ? together with their families and communities by leading efforts to ensure needed behavioral health services are accessible and outcomes are successful.
Sense of Purpose and/or Spiritual Wellness
This is not part of national model, but we felt it very important to the overall wellness of our communities and people.
The Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF)
Healthy Communities Coalition has structured our 2022-2024 Comprehensive Community Prevention Plan according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration?s (SAMHSA) Strategic Prevention Framework (SPF). The five steps that comprise the SPF enable coalitions to build the infrastructure necessary for effective and sustainable prevention. Each step contains key milestones and products that are essential to the validity of the process. The SPF is conceived of in systemic terms and reflects a public health, community-based approach to delivering effective prevention.
Our SPF process is inclusive of culturally competent strategies to the best of our abilities. We realize cultural competence is an ongoing process and will continue to train staff and coalition partners. HCC feels strongly that people who use the services should also be part of the entire SPF process inclusive of youth, people in recovery, people who have financial challenges, etc.
Step #1: Assessment
Profile population needs, resources, and readiness to address needs and gaps. HCC mobilizes key stakeholders, including culturally competent groups to collect the needed data to define problems within our geographic area. We ensure that our key stakeholders understand the roll of culture, race, ethnicity and gender as they relate to our assessment strategies. HCC also completes an assessment of readiness and leadership to implement policies, programs, and practices. See the assessment in our Community Prevention Plan for detailed needs and our implementation plan following for a synopsis of need and gaps.
Step #2: Capacity
Mobilize and/or build capacity to address needs HCC mobilizes resources within Lyon, Storey, and Mineral counties to convene key stakeholders, and service providers to plan and implement sustainable prevention efforts in Steps 3-4 of the SPF. The mobilization of resources includes both financial and organizational resources as well as the creation of partnerships. See our Capacity section in the Community Prevention Plan for details and our coalition partnership list of active participants. We have increased recruiting human resources that ensures cultural representation for our Hispanic population.
Step #3: Planning
Develop a Comprehensive Strategic Plan HCC developed a strategic plan that includes policies, programs, and practices that created a logical, data-driven plan to address the problems we identified in Step 1 of the SPF. We also identified programs and adaptations (such as translating to Spanish) to be inclusive of our region?s Hispanic, Native American and LGBTQ populations. The planning process produced strategic goals, objectives, and performance targets as well as logic models and action plans. See our Planning section in the Community Prevention Plan for details and our logic models included in this narrative.
Step #4: Implementation
Implement evidence-based prevention programs, policies, and practices. HCC has been implementing and planning concurrently now for more than 13 years, and we have taken action guided by our Strategic Plan created in Step 3 of the SPF. We have completed action plans, and selected specific policies, programs, and practices that best fit our needs and capacity. Please see our implementation section of our Community Prevention Plan.
Step #5: Evaluation
Monitor, evaluate, sustain, and improve or replace those that fail We have evaluated the impact of the SPF and the implemented programs, policies, and practices through our partnership with SAPTA via PIRE. We would like to partner with SAPTA to ensure our data collection methods are culturally responsive and appropriate. HCC has also completed satisfaction surveys, community norm surveys, collected trend data, and conducted key stakeholder interviews to see how we have been doing over the years. Our evaluations lead us to expand collaborative work across sectors under our Health and Wellness Hub. As a result, we are seeing better outcomes.
If funded we will continue to repeat the SPF process to ensure we are meeting the changing needs of our communities, using up to date policies, programs, and practices, and making positive change in our communities. HCC?s completion of the SPF process helps this region leverage other money to fund our plan and that is why our Community Prevention Plan goes beyond the SAPTA prioritized strategies and includes national priorities as well. Our partnership with SAPTA has been positive because our coalition uses a cascading form of training and leadership that has been able to leverage all SAPTA funds.
