About Us
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Who we are:
Health Action is a community-based health promotion Trust. We've been around since 1982 doing all sorts of health promotion work. We are governed by a Board of Trustees that meets each month to set and monitor the policy direction for Health Action and review operational outputs and outcomes. Read the Staff Profiles, & Becoming a Trustee, which includes Board Member profiles.
Read about our logo.
Where we're at:
People's health and well-being is affected by all aspects of their everyday life. From our perspective good health and well-being is created by caring for oneself and others, and by being able to make decisions and have control over one's life. Our society, culture and environment all have a crucial role to play in our health.
Health Action's Health Promotion work is guided by the five strands of the Ottawa Charter - here it is in brief:
1. Building healthy public policy - this is about trying to get policy makers to think about how their decisions will affect the health of people in the community.
2. Creating supportive environments - this is about making the healthy choice the easy choice in the places where we live, love, work & play: supporting and enabling people to take care of themselves, each other, and their communities.
3. Strengthening community action - identifying problems and developing lasting solutions to address them, using strategies that encourage people in communities to collaboratively gain ownership and control of their health issues.
4. Developing personal skills - of health promoters, policy makers and all individuals in the community. We believe that giving good information about health and well-being increases people's control and ability to make informed decisions about their health.
5. Reorienting health services - working alongside health, as well as social, political and economic sectors to bring about change, because people's health is affected by a whole range of factors.
We also think that it's really important to work closely with other organisations in a collaborative way, and to focus our energy on achieving long-term sustainable change in our community.
The kind of stuff we do:
Health Action works alongside people in our community, like young people, parents, teachers and community workers, to help them with their training needs.
Currently most of our projects are focused on young peoples' wellbeing. Here are some examples:
The HeadStrong project is about youth mental health. We work with groups in our community to develop responsive community action strategies to enhance the wellness of young people, with a focus on long term sustainable change in attitudes and behaviour.
We are a party in the Youth Access to Alcohol Project (YATA) - a nationwide ALAC initiative (in 22 communities, of which Nelson is one) to encourage and support local community action, targeted at reducing illegal supply and /or irresponsible supply of alcohol by adults to young people.
Health Action supports the White House Inc, a community centre run by and for users of local mental health services, and provides "COMPASS ~ Community Mental Health Peer Advocacy and Support Service" - a team of advocates who support mental health service users. We also provide the Kotuku service.
We are also a CAYAD contractor, (Community Action on Youth & Drugs). Historically we've had a major focus on Safer Partying, supporting young people to upskill in organising safer parties. The "Health Action Group" (HAGs) at Nelson College for Girls worked with us on a community action project to develop a pamphlet Safer partying rules...where Lulu shares her safer partying tips.
We also support Nelson Youth Council's Youth Event Support financial back-up for youth events: young people can apply for up to $500 underwriting or funding (or a combo of both) for Nelson youth events which they're organising.
We research and develop safer partying educational resources both locally and nationally, including the original version of the Ministry of Health Guidelines for Safe Dance Parties resource. Please Go to Sitemap for further resource examples.
We work alongside venues and events promoters, to help them to develop safety policies and practices.
We work to advocate and lobby for youth rights and respond to emerging youth issues with the Nelson Youth Council, and Health Action Groups as well as other youth organisations.
In the last few years we instigated the Youth Boards project - noticeboards for youth issues in local high schools; Waimea College, Nayland College, Motueka High, Nelson College for Girls, and Nelson College.
We promote Youth Voting, and poll candidates on youth issues prior to elections. Online you can find Candidates in NCC By-Election 2003 responses, as well as responses to our 2002 survey of local parliamentary candidates and our 2001 survey of DHB, NCC and TDC candidates.
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