Partnering with Pathways to a Healthy Kansas
The Pathways initiative known as Pathways to a Healthy Kansas combines community-wide evidence-based solutions and promising practices for improving active living, healthy eating, and tobacco prevention to make a large impact across multiple sectors in communities. The program provides community coalitions with the tools and resources needed to engage their communities and remove barriers to healthy living. Pathways started in 2016 with eight communities and expanded to 16 communities in 2017. In 2020, the Pathways initiative started a second phase of work with a total of 24 communities – 12 new and 12 returning communities from across the BCBSKS service area.
Addressing Three Key Risk Factors
Three risk factors – physical inactivity, poor nutrition and tobacco use – lead to four of the leading causes of chronic disease resulting in 80 percent of the deaths in the United States. Increasing physical activity, eating healthy and avoiding tobacco are among the best ways to lower risk for developing chronic diseases and to live healthier, longer. These are the factors Pathways is designed to address in communities.
The Pathways
Many paths must come together to make real, sustainable change in a community. That’s why grantees are required to generate cross-sector engagement. During the first phase of the initiative, communities focused on these seven pathways: community policy, community well-being, food retail, health care, restaurants, schools and worksites.
In phase two, community pathways are designed to help the coalition take a holistic, community-wide approach to improving health outcomes by addressing the social determinants of health (SDOH). Social determinants are the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age that fundamentally affect a wide range of health outcomes and risk (CDC). Pathways align with the Kaiser Family Foundation’s framework for the social determinants of health and focus on areas that impact community health across multiple factors: Community & Social Context, Neighborhood & Physical Environment, Food, Healthcare, Education, and Economic Stability. By using this framework for each pathway, this initiative will strive to improve conditions that are the drivers of health in a community. Coalitions select a package, or group of packages from each pathway below to work on throughout the four-year grant period.
Pathways Communities
The Pathways to a Healthy Kansas encourages community coalitions to identify the strategies that will work best for their residents and community culture, taking into account how their projects impact populations of focus and raising up those voices to advance health equity and improve the overall health of their community.
In Shawnee County, the Pathways grant is coordinated by G'Tobia Washington on behalf of Heartland Healthy Neighborhoods, a community health coalition of which United Way is a member. Brett Martin, UWGT Vice President of Community Impact is also the current chair of HHN. G'Tobia's position is housed at the United Way offices.
