Community health improvement partnership
Envisioning a healthier Hennepin County
The Community Health Improvement Partnership (CHIP) was formed to foster alliances across organizations in multiple sectors to target community health issues together for greater impact. It was founded in 2012 by the Community Health Boards of Hennepin County, Minneapolis, Bloomington, Edina, and Richfield and their partners.
The partnership closed out and celebrated its first 5-years in 2017 while planning for the future. Data and community input collected through multiple venues led to CHIP’s new focus on increased mental health and well-being in communities over the next 3-5 years.
Two overarching strategies have been chosen to address this:
- Support mental wellbeing in communities through policy and systems changes
- Address housing stability as a social determinant of mental health and wellbeing
A new CHIP Executive Committee was established in December 2017 with key partners representing these strategies. The committee has worked since then to gather more community input, and created overarching CHIP roles and principles, as well as vision statements and work plans for each of the two strategies.
We also have a strong commitment to racial equity as demonstrated by this statement:
Health and racial equity
Health and racial equity are at the core of our work. Because of this, we will focus on the ways structural and institutional racism and bias impact outcomes for people of color. We will use a racial equity lens to focus our intent, which will bring us all to a shared understanding, language, and definitions on race and bias as we catalyze and carry out our work.