Healthy Living

Submitted by Richard on Fri, 14/03/2008 - 5:33am

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What Is Healthy Living?

Healthy living is the practice of behaviour that improves, maintains and enhances health. It is very much a life-style choice. To live healthy applies not only to the physical well being, but to one's mental and spiritual aspects of daily living as well. Not only eating healthy, not smoking, controlling one's alcohol intake and staying physically active, but building a circle of social contacts, improving the conditions and environments of where we live, work, learn and play.

Healthy living is about both the individual and the general population creating attitudes that will enhance life and living together.

A healthy community is one which maintains those elements that enable people to maintain a high quality of life and productivity within a safe environment. It is a secure, forward looking community with the presence of roads, schools, playgrounds, and other services to meet the needs of the people.

A community that actively promotes the arts and local entertainment. A community that encourages a variety of sports involvement and team work.

A community that includes access to health care services that focus on both treatment and prevention for all members of the community.

A healthy community welcomes the values of religion and ethnic diversity in all their complexity.

A diverse and vital local economy and market has support from all residents of the community.

Protection of the community's natural environment is foremost in all developement and growth.

At it's core is a heart that is passionate for it's achievements and heritage and sympathetic to those less fortunate.

A healthy community gives hope for a stable future.

A healthy community promotes healthy living and builds healthy people in body and mind and spirit, developing the feeling that they belong, and in return, recognize a mutual responsibility to the community they are part of.

What is a Healthy Community?

From: International Healthy Cities Foundation (IHCF)

What are healthy communities? Are they all the same? Are they similar in size? Are their populations homogeneous? Do they have the same health, education, governance, transportation, safety, environmental and quality of life issues? The answer is a resounding “no”.

Healthy Communities are unique, but they have common elements that allow us to consider them collectively. Healthy Communities have a vision of future well being for the total community, and and employ a process that helps them achieve their goals. Communities can be concerned with employment and jobs, safety and security, education, children and families, housing or environmental pollution as their prime concern. No matter what the primary focus is, the complex web of relationships to improve the quality of life in communities and cities, are our concerns. A Healthy community then, is not simply an outcome, but a process that accommodates changing conditions and promotes improvement in the quality of life of its citizens.

A key element of the Healthy Communities concept is the use of a collaborative problem-solving process that allows a broad spectrum of community stakeholders to create a vision of of well being and implement a plan to turn its vision into reality."

Fostering Healthy Families, Individuals, and Youth

Communities will face a variety of challenging social issues, such as substance abuse, domestic abuse, poverty, and other concerns related to the elderly, youth, and families. Addressing these concerns effectively takes the coordinated efforts of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Support services such as adequate child day care, comprehensive after-school, youth, teen, and senior programs, preventative health programs, and substance abuse programs, parenting and family support programs, and effective human service networks help strengthen the social fabric of a community.

Aided by effective communication, compassionate leadership, active citizen participation, and inter-group cooperation, a comprehensive package of supportive services will enable a community to nurture a healthy community and healthy community members.

Resources

**How Healthy Are Canada's Communities

**Ecojustice: Healthy Communities

**Ontario Healthy Communities Coalition

**(UNA-Canada) Healthy Children and Healthy Communities

**Ecovillage: The Community Page

**Growing Healthy First Nation and Inuit communities across Canada

**British Columbia 2010 Legacies Now

One Further Thought;

There was a recent movie called “Evan Almighty”. Good entertainment, quite funny. A man runs for Congress on the slogan: Change the World. God calls him to task on this and commands Evan to build an ark. At the end of the movie Evan discovers the meaning of changing the world through building an ark;
ARK: an anagram for – Act of Random Kindness.

How true. You may not change the world but, you will influence your neighborhood.
Do an Act of Random Kindness every day.

Imagine if everyone did!

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