City officials have unveiled a new health initiative aimed at improving residents’ well-being through a coordinated approach between local government, businesses and community members.
The “Healthy Morgan Hill” initiative, in development for nearly two years, will kick off May 10. During a recent stakeholder meeting, initiative leaders outlined plans to transform the city’s health.
Mayor Mark Turner said the initiative began after his 2022 election, sparked by discussions with Chamber of Commerce President Nick Gaich about “Blue Zones”—regions where people live longer than average due to lifestyle and community factors.
“When you have a healthy individual, it leads to healthy families, which leads to a healthy community,” Turner said.
While the city explored implementing an official Blue Zones program, cost concerns led them to develop their own approach, which gave rise to the Healthy Morgan Hill initiative.
“If you move forward with what they do, it is a rather expensive ordeal,” Turner said. “We realized that we probably couldn’t go down that road because of those costs, but we did feel strongly that we can implement a program very similar to Blue Zones and still have an impact.”
The initiative responds to troubling health statistics in both Morgan Hill and California. According to the State of Chronic Disease in California report cited by Turner, nearly 17% of California adults report “fair” or “poor” health status, with hypertension, obesity, arthritis, mental illness, diabetes and cardiovascular disease among leading chronic conditions.
Angelica Diaz, director of the Healthy Communities branch of the Department of Public Health, demonstrated that Morgan Hill faces several specific challenges, including high death rates for certain conditions compared to neighboring cities.
“Morgan Hill had the second highest death rate for cancer among cities, with 126.6 deaths per 100,000 city residents,” Diaz said. The city also had “the third-highest death rate for heart disease” and “the highest death rate for Alzheimer’s disease.”
While diabetes rates in Morgan Hill are lower than county and state averages, obesity rates exceed the Santa Clara County average, with 26.2% of Morgan Hill adults having a BMI of 30 or above.
The initiative established four goals: improving residents’ health and well-being, integrating policy and infrastructure planning with wellness efforts; positioning Morgan Hill as a hub where health and economic vitality intersect; and maintaining community stakeholder engagement.
“It isn’t about forcing it, because we can’t force anything on anyone,” Turner said. “What we can do is provide information, options and opportunities, and incentives, for people to engage and desire to live a more healthy life.”
Gaich stressed the importance of policy and structure in achieving lasting change.
“What we’re talking about here today is not just a change of behaviors, it also requires structure, discipline, and a big part of that is policy,” he said. “The City of Morgan Hill stepped up a year ago to make this a strategic priority and creating the Healthy Morgan Hill Initiative was paramount to where we are today.”
Gaich outlined an approach centered on “an ecosystem of mindset and behavior changes” through three strategies: community-led efforts, education and urban planning/public policy.
“The mission itself is designed purposefully to incorporate four things. Evidence-based strategies, community advocacy, and civic and local policy,” Gaich said. “We can extend our discussions beyond just Morgan Hill. We want to make sure we are collecting resources and opportunities available to use both regionally and nationally.”
Officials emphasized connections between community health and economic prosperity.
“We always want to make sure that we link up a healthy community with economic prosperity, because it is our business community that will be here to support, whether it is a resident or employee, what is present here in Morgan Hill,” Gaich said.
Diaz highlighted broader health factors, explaining that “health begins where we live, work, play, eat and learn.” Seventy percent of health outcomes are determined by socioeconomic factors such as income and education, she said.
“For renter households in Morgan Hill, in 49.8% of households the gross rent is 30% or more of the household income,” she said. “This means that families are spending the majority of their income, before taxes, on their rent, which leaves little room for other essential needs.”
The initiative will continue engaging stakeholders through community sessions and collaborative planning. Officials acknowledge creating meaningful change will take time.
“We have a long way to go to move us from where we think we are today, in terms of a healthy community, to where we want to be, long-term,” Gaich said. “It doesn’t happen overnight, it truly takes a groundswell to be able to build to that.”
Calvin Nuttall is a Morgan Hill-based freelance reporter.
City officials? Whatever the initiative is doing isn’t known to my city council district representative and all of the ‘announcements’ refer to a group of private citizens except the mayor. If City officials have been using public resources for more than two years how is it possible that their activities have not been disclosed in any public hearings and how is it possible that the entire city council has not been involved for two years?
I assume your characterization of this effort as a City of Morgan Hill activity is unintentionally misleading and factually incorrect.
I do wish all the private members of this group the best of luck and look forward to hearing what they have accomplished in two years!