Margaret Brown

By Margaret Brown April 5, 2024

In my business development role at Blue Zones, I field roughly 15 phone calls a week from leaders who all echo the same complaint: “Nothing is changing.” It doesn’t matter the size or scale of their community health improvement plans, or the fact that most of them have been in the works since 2012. It doesn’t even matter the needs—usually involving improvements of primary healthcare access, food insecurity, high rates of obesity or diabetes, and mental health services—they are trying to address. In each case, these leaders have been following the tried-and-true “best practices” of traditional community impact models….