Our Mission

Healthy Mountain Communities fosters regional collaboration and innovation to improve people's quality of life.

HMC organizes ongoing forums for regional dialogue, collaboration and networking and offers a package of data, strategic planning and decision support tools to help community leaders better understand issues and implement solutions at the local and regional level. 

Our History

In the spring of 1993, over 100 residents began a year-long planning process that identified key issues facing the region. These citizens created HMC to foster regional connections between citizens, local governments, and community sectors and to facilitate solutions to the broad health issues (social, economic, environmental) affecting communities. This process and seed funding for HMC were provided as part of the through the Colorado Trust's statewide Healthy Communities Initiative.

In short, Healthy Mountain Communities is a means to work on issues that extend beyond political boundaries and a way for citizens, business leaders, and local governments to collaborate in new and exciting ways. It is also an advocate of a broader, and longer term definition of health in our communities — a definition that connects the qualities of our lives, our communities, our economy, and our environment.

Today, HMC involves citizens, elected officials, and organizations in several initiatives and projects and aimed at making the communities of the Parachute to Aspen Region healthy in the broadest sense of the term.

Our Approach

Regional Focus
Many problems cross political boundaries, which makes them difficult for individual communities to solve alone. Taking a regional perspective can help pool resources to address common problems.

Collaboration
More people can win and win more often when we work with each other. Collaboration often means working with unlikely partners and across community sectors to achieve common goals. Such an approach to problem solving takes advantage of the many talents and resources in our region to the fullest extent possible.

Citizen Democracy
Creating healthy communities requires more citizen participation than a trip to the voting booth every four years. Fortunately, citizens are a wealth of information, skills, and perspectives waiting to be tapped. Broader citizen participation in problems that affect our everyday lives can make addressing problems easier and solutions more enduring.

Systemic thinking
The health of a community relates to the jobs people have, the neighborhoods they  live in, and the state of their environment, as well as numerous other factors.  Systemic thinking assumes that many of our current problems are connected and cannot be addressed in isolation and that good solutions solve multiple problems.


 

Russ Criswell
Former Carbondale Trustee

Anna Gange
Planner, Design Workshop
(Basalt/Aspen)


Doug Pratte
Principal, The Land Studio, Basalt (Chair)

Randy Ready
Asst. City Manager, Aspen

Paul Stepp 
Big Stone Publishing
(Glenwood/Carbondale)

Staff

Colin Laird  Director