St. John’s city council unanimously passed a motion Monday evening to formally establish the Northeast Avalon Healthy Communities Alliance.
It brings together multiple community groups, government and non-governmental organizations who all share a common goal – to make people healthier.
It’s something that been in the works for about a year, but council’s vote of approval will now begin the alliance of groups in the metro area.
“We want to have a healthy community – have a community where people are feeling good, they’re being taken care of and they’re enjoying life. We have many challenges to that – mental-health issues, drugs, addictions,” said Mayor Danny Breen, who will lead the alliance with support from council and city staff.
The initiative began as a result of the Healthy Cities Forum hosted at city hall last autumn. Since that forum, the city began working on smaller projects, but Breen said the alliance is a larger-scale effort to “build a healthier city.”
A couple of groups Breen said will join the city in the alliance are the Gathering Place and Choices for Youth, among others.
“This is an opportunity for us to come together as one group and really attempt to focus our energies here in terms of how we can all work together to make the city – and the whole region – better for everyone,” said Breen.
“We look at it as kind of a hub-and-spoke approach – you have the hub of all the groups, and then from each there’ll be different projects that we can take on, working in collaboration with different groups.
“A lot of the things we’re doing anyway, we just haven’t totally aligned them in the correct manner, so that’s what it’s really all about.”
The first meeting will be held around the end of January, and the first goal will be to discuss how the various groups can better align their resources. They’ll also discuss what projects they can all work on together.
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