The Backyard Initiative - Working together to improve health in our community

The Backyard is the approximately one square mile area surrounding Allina Commons (Allina's corporate headquarters), Abbott Northwestern Hospital and Phillips Eye Institute in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Backyard includes the neighborhoods of Ventura Village, Phillips West, Midtown Phillips, East Phillips, Central, Powderhorn Park and Corcoran. The boundaries are Interstate 94, Interstate 35W, 38th Street South and Hiawatha Ave.

Many things contribute to health including behaviors, social conditions, genetics, environment and access to health care. Allina is working with Backyard residents and organizations to address these determinants of health by:

• Engaging communities: Engaging people who live in the Backyard to define what it means to be healthy and work together to improve health.
• Allina has partnered with the Phillips Powderhorn Cultural Wellness Center to facilitate the community engagement process. Backyard residents are invited to community meetings that occur the first Thursday of the month. For more details, call the Cultural Wellness Center at 612-721-5745 or visit www.ppcwc.org.
• Building bridges: Increase coordination and collaboration among service providers to make it easier for residents to get the services they need to be healthy.
• Focusing on prevention: Prevent health problems before they occur and reduce problems when a disease exists.
• Expanding access: Work with Portico Healthnet to increase access to health care for community residents.
• See how Portico Healthnet helps families access health care. (Windows Media Player required)
• Starting early: Ensure that children in the community have a healthy start necessary for success in school and beyond.

Allina has worked closely with community residents on an assessment plan and process that provides a snapshot of the health of Backyard residents:

• Completed 20 listening circles with the various cultural groups in the Backyard area where residents gathered to discuss questions related to their health.
• Hired and trained community residents to plan and lead the listening circles. A Community Health Action Team (CHAT) that includes community residents is analyzing information from the listening circles. The CHAT team will share the results in early 2010.
• Hired and trained community residents to conduct 750 in-person interviews with Backyard residents in their homes. These walk-around interviews began in November 2009 and will run throughout January of 2010.

A team of Backyard residents in partnership with Allina, the Cultural Wellness Center, the University of Minnesota, and Wilder Research will use the information gathered as a means to understand the current health of Backyard residents and to inform the Initiative going forward.

Allina asked residents of the Backyard about what health means to them. They defined health as: The extent to which an individual or group is able, on the one hand, to realize aspirations and satisfy needs, and, on the other hand, to change or cope with the environment.

Health is therefore seen as a resource for daily life, not the objective of living. It is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacity (World Health Organization).

• Health is a state of physical, mental, social, and spiritual well-being.
• Health is the state of balance, harmony, and connectedness within and between many systems – the body, the family, the community, the environment and culture.
• Health is an active state of being; people must be active participants to be healthy.
• Health is not only the absence of infirmity and disease.
• Health cannot be seen only in an individual context.
• Health cannot be achieved by being passive.