This private non-profit corporation was formed in Carroll County, MD in 1999 by Carroll Hospital Center (then Carroll County General Hospital) and the Carroll County Health Department.

The concept of a separate, community-based corporation supporting health and quality of life improvement efforts is a progressive, innovative joint venture model.

These organizations recognized the most significant opportunity for health improvement as achievable through the lifestyle and behavior actions of individuals and organizations.

This perspective is supported by the work of many in the evolving work associated with creating healthier communities.

Tyler Norris, writing in the fall of 1994 for Good Medicine said "The health of individuals and their communities are largely the product of our social environments, incomes, and the choices we make as individuals and as members of our communities."

Norris references the work of Mark Lelonde of the Canadian Health Ministry who has developed a Health Field Conceptual Model - Influence Factors on Health Status.

It clearly demonstrates the overwhelming impact of lifestyle and behavior.

Our corporation is facilitating the efforts to gain a healthier status. We are doing this via a focus on the total community - social, economic, geographic, and political - which as Norris says, is the ideal context for health promotion. For this reason, private citizens and the business, nonprofit, and governmental sectors can work cooperatively to identify issues and find solutions to them. 

We are an organization of partners, collaborating and cooperating for results.