A State Unites Around Vital Conditions for All to Thrive: Healthy Communities Delaware (HCD)
Three words stand out when you visit Healthy Communities Delaware’s (HCD) website: alignment, investment, and impact. They are HCD’s pillars guiding the public/private collaboration jointly managed by three entities—the Delaware Division of Public Health, Delaware Community Foundation, and the University of Delaware Partnership for Healthy Communities—and their work with investors and communities to create conditions for all Delawareans to thrive.
Alignment has been at the core of The Rippel Foundation’s engagement with HCD and its diverse network that encompasses 15 communities and 21 community-based organizations and coalition partners working to improve health, well-being, and equity across the state. Rippel’s longstanding relationship with HCD began with sharing the concepts of shared stewardship, a practice that was fundamental to HCD’s leaders as they advocated for partners to adopt the vital conditions for health and well-being as the framework to unify and accelerate their collective efforts with guidance from Rippel. Together with HCD, Rippel delivered a “Thriving Together Through Shared Stewardship Webinar Series” for stakeholders, conveying HCD’s sense of shared stewardship in creating Delaware communities that thrive as places to live, work, and play.
As alignment took hold, investment and impact followed, most notably when a statewide coalition embedded the vital conditions in the Delaware State Health Improvement Plan (SHIP).
Stewarding a statewide shift in mindsets
The statewide shift toward aligning resources to address the vital conditions began during 2023 and 2024 when HCD invited Rippel to help design and facilitate pivotal strategy, planning, and funding sessions, including:
Rippel guides stewards to work toward a wide variety of system changes that improve health and well-being. Here are a few examples:
• Shifting investments to expand the vital conditions for well-being, like humane housing, meaningful work, and a thriving natural world, and decreasing reliance on urgent services
• Helping health care systems shift resources to focus on whole-person community health
• Rebuilding unjust power structures to be more inclusive
• Breaking down siloes between separate institutions, between departments within a single institution, and between institutions and community residents
- How to maximize the use of grant dollars from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to improve equitable health and well-being for Delawareans;
- A statewide health and human services convening, “Moving Delaware Forward: From Equity Awareness to Action,” bringing together approximately 20 organizations and hundreds of guests as a network of investor and community partners working to improve health, well-being and equity across the state;
- And an in-person workshop for a diverse group of community stakeholders from government and civil sector organizations as part of the 2023 Delaware State Health Improvement Plan Coalition Summit that led to the SHIP embracing vital conditions.
In each engagement, Rippel’s ReThink Health initiative provided tools and guidance to help HCD partners collectively shift mindsets to think more upstream. Looking at the underlying factors that influence health outcomes shed light on how to balance urgent services with vital conditions, tackle disparities, and create measurable systems change. Rippel’s ability to deliver clear concepts, a common language, and guidance for understanding and adopting the vital conditions accelerated HCD’s progress and leveraged its role as a catalyst to align and adopt the framework statewide. A Delaware community is using the framework for its comprehensive neighborhood planning process.
“Rippel helped us grasp clear concepts, clear language, and clear tools that we can use to do the things that we already wanted to do but would have spent a lot of time trying to workshop ourselves. It was an accelerator.”
-Kate Dupont Phillips, HCD Executive Director
HCD and partners are applying for federal funding for vital conditions—a federal shift partially driven by Rippel. And various sectors, from education to community development, are coming together with a new vision for sustainable solutions to enhance well-being and community strengths.
Accelerating the pace of change through multisolving
Aligning HCD’s multiple partners and sectors with the vital conditions provided the opportunity for Rippel’s ReThink Health team to introduce multisolving. Multisolving is an approach that advances multiple goals at once in a way that is mutually reinforcing and results in many shared benefits. Through a series of facilitated workshops with Delaware elected officials, business owners, community-based organizations, health systems, funders, and agencies leading on vital conditions, the ReThink Health team supported new multisolving ideas to emerge.
As one example, a discussion about how to increase client access to Community Health Workers (CHWs) led to ideas to potentially improve and strengthen multiple vital conditions for health and well-being. By leveraging cultural competencies, CHWs could tailor health education among diverse communities. They could provide social support and reduce isolation. As trusted community members, CHWs could model healthy activities and behaviors for parents and children and teach patients to navigate systems and advocate for their own needs. And they could promote humane housing, serving as a conduit between residents and landlords or housing authorities to resolve issues, access resources, or recommend health-related repairs.
As HCD and partners in Delaware saw the power of multisolving, it began to proliferate across the state. Multisolving became the way to prioritize strategies in the SHIP, thinking through which solutions could produce the greatest impact. Amongst grantees, HCD is encouraging multisolving solutions in funding proposals to advance multiple vital conditions priorities.
Cultivating the next generation of stewards
From multisolving to creating sustainable impact requires young Delawareans to join the movement. Rippel’s team helped codesign a curriculum around the Vital Conditions for Delaware schools with educators, students, and the University of Delaware for evaluation support. The result, “My Thriving Community Toolkit,” is primarily focused on shaping lesson plans and learning activities for high school students. In designing the lesson plans, HCD developed
a two-minute engaging and inclusive educational video about the Vital Conditions in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole that is currently used for multiple purposes and audiences. It will be an important component for teachers to introduce the vital conditions when the toolkit is piloted in spring 2025 to cultivate the next generation of Delawarean stewards.
Multisolving
Solving our most pressing problems requires understanding how one part of the equation affects all of the others. In the simplest terms, multisolving is the practice of identifying and advocating for policies and investments that can solve multiple problems, often across sectors.
Thriving together, no exceptions
Rippel’s engagement with HCD began with stewarding alignment, to help partners think and act collectively to affect systems change in support of a more equitable future for all, with no exceptions. The result has been a state that is invested—and investing—in deepening the vital conditions that will enable all Delawareans to thrive.