Colorado Healthy Eating and Active Living Cities and Towns Campaign

The goal of the Healthy Eating/Active Living (HEAL) Cities and Towns Campaign is to provide municipal leaders with the information, tools, and personalized assistance they need to promote and adopt policies that advance population health. Colorado is composed of 271 cities and towns and has one of the fastest-growing obesity rates in the nation. Colorado's Campaign began in 2012 with a partnership between LiveWell Colorado and the Colorado Municipal League. As a grantee of a regional public health organization, the Campaign Coordinator provides technical assistance to municipal leaders and recognizes cities and towns that adopt varied HEAL policies with four designations: Eager, Active, Fit, and Elite. These designations are based on the total number of policies the municipality currently has and how many they are willing to adopt to move up in status, ranging from Eager (working on one policy) to Elite (at least five policies adopted). Since 2012, there have been 50 Colorado cities and towns that have joined the Campaign reaching more than 2.9 million Colorado residents (more than 50% of the population). Sixteen percent of Colorado's population lives in a city or town with at least five HEAL policies. The purpose of this special article is to describe how the Campaign in Colorado uses tailored technical assistance to help municipalities adopt HEAL-related policies and share some lessons learned for other public health organizations working on similar campaigns.

This article is part of a supplement entitled Building Thriving Communities Through Comprehensive Community Health Initiatives, which is sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, Community Health.