• What We Do

We are an alliance of stakeholders in community health working together to create healthy and thriving communities in western North Carolina.

We strengthen community health together

We lead WNC Healthy Impact, a partnership between hospitals, public health agencies, and key regional partners in western North Carolina, working towards a vision of improved community health. We are working together locally and regionally on a community health improvement process to assess health needs, develop collaborative plans, take coordinated action, and evaluate progress and impact.

We support local community health improvement

…for local leaders and partners to:

  • Complete local community health assessments, which establish common ground with shared priorities built from transparent data
  • Conduct listening sessions to amplify the voices of those most impacted by key health issues
  • Lead community-wide strategic planning to agree on a path forward
  • Craft performance measures to know if we’re getting there

View a fact sheet about support provided through WNC Healthy Impact.

We strengthen the “how” of health improvement.

  • Infuse Results-Based Accountability (RBA) in planning, evaluation, quality improvement, and funding strategies
  • Provide tailored RBA training for customers, their grantees, and partners
  • Co-design and lead effective community and coalition strategic planning meetings
  • Provide tailored analysis of our regional health data set
  • Amplify the voices of people most affected by key health issues
  • Leverage tools, templates, and processes that we have co-designed and developed over the past several years

We collect and curate high-quality regional data.

Since 2011, we have collected and provided foundational data for local and regional community health efforts:

  • Primary Data including: WNC Healthy Impact Community Health Survey and WNC Healthy Impact Key Informant Survey
  • Secondary Data including: demographic, economic, and social characteristics of the region and morbidity and mortality data
  • Maps
  • 2-1-1 Resource Lists

We make regional data more accessible & engaging:

We enhance and support health communications.

  • Convene a group of public health & hospital communications/marketing professionals across the region – the WNC Health Communicators Collaborative – to collaborate across key regional health issues, public relations, emergency preparedness, and joint learning opportunities
  • Coordinate a collaborative regional COVID-19 communications campaign, My Reason WNC.
  • Co-design communications strategies and tools that help bolster the region’s understanding of how hospitals and public health agencies collaborate in the region to improve community health; the community health improvement process in western NC; how it works and how to get involved; and each county’s local health priorities
  • Share stories of community health improvement in the region in our monthly eNewsletter, on our Facebook page, and in key health issue data stories