Want a Bigger Impact with Your Public Health Campaign? Partner with Other State Agencies that Share Your Goals

Excerpted from original story on GovLoop — a publication that serves a community of more than 300,000 government leaders by helping them to foster collaboration, learn from each other, solve problems and advance in their government careers.

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Across the country, state-run agencies create programs and resources to advance their missions — whether those are public health, higher education, child care, transportation or something else. Their goals typically center on supporting the health, happiness, prosperity and well-being of their states and residents.

During this process, clarity of purpose and collaboration are essential, as they seek to impact the same audiences from issue to issue: their states’ residents. However, cross-collaboration between departments can be elusive. It is inefficient and frustrating when the actions of one department or agency greatly impact the others. The solution comes in working to advance shared objectives across departments and programs, helping to achieve greater collective impact.

Colorado’s Department of Human Services (CDHS) and Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) are collaborating on a public health behavior change campaign that seeks to address the upstream factors that influence young people’s decisions to engage in healthy behaviors. The effort focuses on building stronger relationships among youth and between youth, their parents, and other adults in the community.

Visit GovLoop to see three strategies CDHS and CDPHE used to create a smooth process that helped to launch one of the most ambitious intra-agency public health campaigns in our state’s history, called Forward Together.