Healthy Living Alliance (HLA)
The Healthy Living Alliance (HLA) believes that partnerships and communication at all levels are crucial to the development and success of activities and services to local communities. Meaningful consultation builds relationships, improves policy development and enhances the design and delivery of services and programmes. We have concentrated our efforts to build partnerships and interprofessional learning into the heart of our development, locally, regionally and nationally.
The purpose of the HLA is to co-ordinate and provide leadership and cohesion for organisations, activities and services that deliver preventive health and lifestyle solutions within local communities. Such organisations might be Voluntary, Social Enterprise or Statutory (ie. Primary Care Trusts or Local Authorities). We refer to the services and solutions they deliver as Healthy Living Initiatives (HLIs).
Preventive health can be described as the actions taken to help people avoid developing illnesses or to prevent their conditions from worsening. For example, cancer prevention includes avoiding risk factors (such as smoking, obesity, lack of exercise) and increasing protective factors such as getting regular physical activity, staying at a healthy weight, and having a healthy diet.
Working at a grass root level, Healthy Living Initiatives aim to address this problem and focus instead on providing solutions that encourage people to adopt healthier lifestyles with a view to preventing avoidable illnesses, such as heart disease, diabetes and depression before they manifest themselves.
It is widely recognised that 'grass roots' organisations are improving access and take up of community-based services and are becoming an important resource for developing community infrastructure. However, until the set up of the HLA, such organisations have had:
- Little or no coordinated support in their particular health-related service area
- Difficulty in accessing funding sustainability at a time of change in preventive health delivery
- Difficulty in promoting and measuring success because they often work in isolation
- No mechanism to influence health change outside their local area
- No advocacy vehicle to campaign on their behalf regionally and nationally
- No umbrella organisation to represent them as a sector or work in their behalf
Taking forward the lessons and experience learned from the successful Big Lottery Healthy Living Centres programme, the HLA offers regional and nationwide networking and encourages all local grass root organisations to get strategically involved and develop localised partnership working by becoming a member of the HLA. It is fast becoming the national lead and third sector infrastructure organisation and knowledge hub for community-based preventive health.
The HLA is the only national organisation supporting grass root community led organisations, activity and/or services focusing specifically on healthy living and well-being in the broadest sense and on measures to prevent ill-health. The HLA has an understanding of the needs of local community services and activity working at the ‘front line’, enabling mechanisms such as direct lines of communication locally, regionally and nationally as well as opportunities for innovative ways of working and partnership development, ultimately narrowing the gap between the statutory and voluntary sectors.
Find out more at: www.healthylivingalliance.org
