Way to Wellville

The Way to Wellville is the five-year health challenge founded by angel investor Esther Dyson. Over the past 18 months, the Wellville 5 - Clatsop County, Oregon; Lake County, California; Muskegon County, Michigan; Niagara Falls, New York; and Spartanburg, South Carolina - have developed their leadership teams, added staff, engaged a broader local leadership network, drafted value propositions and business cases, abandoned some strategies and adopted others, attracted resources and gained momentum to improve health. The practices of business planning have helped them align their constituents around ambitious, even audacious goals and learn to make their case to investors of all types including foundations, government agencies, corporate partners, local businesses and the public at large.

As an investor, Dyson sees health as an asset with value. She and her partners launched the Way to Wellville to find new ways to increase health value through smarter investment and greater accountability. Here’s the catch: community health and investment are worlds apart, and the parties needed a common language to find their way to Wellville together.

Enter ReThink Health. Supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we set out to help the communities make a business case for health and develop a discipline of business planning over the course of a year as a way to bring more plans to life. The initial reaction of the participants was one of curiosity and caution. They did want to know how to increase their “invest-ability”. And they all had plans of some type already. Why would it take so long to write a business plan? We proposed taking a lesson from the most successful businesses who approach planning as an action learning process that is on-going. Having a document that captures the logic, value proposition and plans is important, but the power of the document to move to action depends on the process – planning.