Opening Thoughts

The Healthy Belvedere Initiative (HBI) is a partnership between Kaiser Permanente (KP), The Community Foundation and the Belvedere Park community to help reduce healthy disparities in the community and create a sustainable community culture of Healthy Eating and Active Living through policy, systems and environmental change.

The HBI has three thrusts: Healthy Eating which has the primary emphasis of the community garden; Active Living which has as primary the walking clubs, MoveME, and other groups such as yoga and 5K races; and third the policy, systems and environmental change group that seeks to discover what the HBI can do to help reduce health disparities on the level of legislative policy, community systems and environment.

The Initiative is in its fifth and final year of funding from KP and the question for the current Healthy Belvedere Steering Committee (HBSC) is how to organize to go forward in a way that continues to serve the community and provides for sustainability of the initiative. There are basically three options:

1) Organize as a 501c3 to seek grants on our own and continue to keep all three initiatives in house.

2) Take the three thrusts and allow community partners to take them all and HBI will not need a 501c3 or significant staff because those issues will be assumed by the partners. For example, partner with the YMCA to promote and sustain the Walking Clubs and other active living initiatives and partner with Peace Lutheran Church to sustain the garden. In this scenario the home owners associations and community groups would be the partners for environmental and policy changes.

3) Some combination of the two so that the HBI will organize as a 501c3 so that the organization would be able to pursue grants and maintain staff as well as work with partners to sustain and enhance various intitiaves.

This is the issue that we are facing and we desired to host a retreat on March 31st but that is no longer possible so let's have the conversation online through this blog so that we can come to a conclusion. We still need to make a decision by March 31st so that we can go forward with our sustainability plan.

Thanks for your input. Ready, set, blog!