The Coalition periodically convenes community stakeholders for meetings and summits on critical health issues. These gatherings provide an opportunity to hear from one another about issues and to identify opportunities for coordinated, focused action. It is our belief that by promoting collaboration and bringing together many different community assets, voices and perspectives, we can reach the best possible solutions and action plans to address complex community issues.

The Whatcom Prosperity Project was convened 2006-2007 by the Whatcom Coalition for Healthy Communities. The goal of the effort has been to bring people together across the different “silos” of service provision to address issues of poverty in Whatcom County and to make action recommendations around policies, resources, service coordination and community engagement and awareness. The process of talking to people about their experiences and needs became a critical first step to making effective recommendations so the group launched a needs assessment project to provide both quantitative type data as well as more in-depth qualitative data. The intent of this report is to provide results of this needs assessment process with low-income families that involved a client intercept paper survey of 610 households along with focus groups and face-to-face interviews with 105 key informants. Additionally an online survey of service providers was conducted. The final Propserity Project Report and several sub-reports looking at special populations can be found at the WhatcomCounts.org Reports Center.

Over the course of our history, the Coalition has co-convened two major summits, one on domestic violence and one on transportation, each leading to ongoing programs to address these issues. We have been involved in many other convening efforts around physical activity, youth, education, and poverty. We brought people together in 2004 to talk about leadership in our community which led to the development of the Leadership Whatcom program.

Our Community Counts program also leads to different kinds of convening opportunities based on the data about how our community is doing in different areas. This data presents us with another opportunity to think about what kind of community we want to be and to find ways to get there. By connecting people and information, we facilitate community action and dialogue.

If there is an issue that you think could benefit from a community gathering and action planning and you think the Coalition could help, please talk to us and see if we can make something happen.

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