Okanagan Similkameen Healthy
Living Coalition
Ours will be the healthiest community in BC
Who we are
 Regional authorities:
 Municipalities (7)
 SDs (3)
 Indian Bands (2)
 RDOS
 Interior Health
 OS Healthy Living Society – convenor
 UBCO
 Okanagan College
 Community working groups
May 2013 Regional Forum
Structure
 Community-driven, bottom up planning and delivery
 Enabling and supportive governance: Constellation Model
 Community Groups:
 Identify assets, gaps, opportunities, champions
 Spawn constellations
 Hub:
 Develop community capacity and competency
 Knowledge Transfer, Knowledge Exchange, Worldview
 Set scope; quality standards; grant writing support, project
management, evaluation, data management, seed grants
Constellation Model
Our Approach
 Move beyond harm avoidance to reward pursuit: paradigm shift
 Health behavior determinants are complex, interactive and




non-linear
To be sustainable, healthy lifestyles must become a new norm
Strategy for cultural change, not just a strategy for individual
lifestyle change
Success will be achieved through multipronged and
simultaneous community-level interventions that reach a
critical mass
Social marketing will be key to success.
A Couple of Old Nuggets:
Every system is
perfectly designed
to achieve exactly
the results it gets.
-W. Edwards Demming
Culture eats
strategy for
breakfast
- Peter Drucker
Success Lies in the Community
 Capacity (Quantitative)
 The number of people with the will and motivation to
bring about change
 Competency (Qualitative)
 The knowledge and skills community champions bring
to the task
 Understand and address the health challenge
 Understand and address the cultural challenge
 Understand and address complexity
 Capacity + Competency = Empowerment
Choices
 “Make the healthy choice the easy choice”
 Awareness
 Accessible
 Affordable
 Attractive
Choices
 “Make the healthy choice the preferred choice”
 Perceived reward
 Social norm
 Personal norm
A Model For Mediators of Lifestyle Choice
Access
Knowledge
Location
Affordability
Capacity
Classroom
Coaching
Internet
Reward
Physical (satiety)
Psychological
(satisfaction)
Social (belonging)
Preferred
Choice
Confidence
Coaching
Mentoring
Validation
Skills
Demonstration
Coaching
Practice
Conclusion
 Emergence of sustainable healthy lifestyles is a challenge in




personal and cultural NORMS
Norms are based on authentic values, satisfaction and reward
Personal norms are strongly influenced by community
norms: the culture we live in and belong to
Health and change management professionals don’t have the
“cure”: this rests with the individual and community
Our role is to help them figure it out for themselves. We
need to develop a curriculum for empowerment that
recognizes complexity.
May 2013 Regional Forum