INSIGHT & INSPIRATION FROM APHA’S 2012 MIDYEAR MEETING

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Survive All In This Friends Prevention, Strategies
& Thrive Together For Health Opportunity & Equity for Health
Community Transformation Grant:
The North Carolina Experience
In 2011, North Carolina received the nation’s fourth-highest Community Transformation Grant,
or CTG, a federal program created by the ACA and focused on community-level interventions to
reduce rates of chronic, preventable diseases. Today, the state’s public health practitioners are
using the grant to truly leverage transformational change toward better health for all.
North Carolina’s CTG work is targeted in four areas: limiting environmental tobacco smoke; improving
active living by design; promoting healthy eating; and improving clinical preventive services,
which is focused on reducing the risk factors for heart disease and stroke via the Million
Hearts campaign. Just a few examples of the state’s goals are to: promote smoke-free regulations
in affordable housing and on university campuses; increase the number of corner stores
that sell healthy, affordable foods; and up the amount of community support for residents living
with high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and those who use tobacco.
“No pilots; we want to begin at scale,” said session presenter Jeffrey Engel, then a health policy
advisor with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. “When you know
that this works, let’s just get beyond the pilot and move it to scale.”
Engel said that the state’s CTG work will also build on efforts to eliminate the “health disparities
that plague our state,” noting that the state Office of Minority Health and Health Disparities
has been fully incorporated into the CTG community so that such inequities will be considered
in all interventions.
Successes to date include the proliferation of smoke-free policies and more fresh food at local