The Healthy Communities Network (HCN) was architected to directly address the problem of fragmented data and resources at the city and community-level, improving the transparency and accountability of activities in any community, and promoting awareness and knowledge sharing to support human and community development missions. It was designed to support informed democracy, the process of collaborative community action, better knowledge-sharing and more efficient allocation of resources — all in support of each community’s vision of improved health and overall quality of life.

The Healthy Communities Network is provided as a low-cost, scalable community web portal. All technical infrastructure and hosting are handled by the Healthy Communities Foundation and the system is easy to customize locally. The combination of core content provided by the Healthy Communities Foundation, blended with locally provided content, creates a unique and central view of a wide array of quality of life material relevant to each community.

We believe use of the Healthy Communities Network will result in the improvement of health and quality of life indicators over time for cities and communities, from reducing infant mortality, childhood obesity, and transportation congestion, to increasing high school graduation rates and the available number of arts and recreation activities. Each community can use the Healthy Communities Network to promote better understanding of quality of life issues, and to move from data awareness to effecting well-informed community change.