New Zealand Healthy Families NZ

A large-scale, community-led prevention initiative in New Zealand built around reshaping the everyday environments, relationships and decision-making that influence health, rather than targeting individual behavior directly. Healthy Families NZ operates through ten teams embedded within a range of lead provider organizations, including Iwi, Whanau Ora providers, local government, regional sports trusts and Pacific-led social change organizations, each taking a locality-based approach on the premise that the most effective and lasting solutions to a community's health and wellbeing challenges are best driven by the people most affected by them. The initiative supports communities to choose healthy food, stay physically active, live smoke-free, minimize the harm caused by alcohol and strengthen mental health and wellbeing, and by its own tenth anniversary it was being described by New Zealand health officials as a promising, non-clinical approach to prevention that works by strengthening local systems rather than running conventional public health messaging campaigns alone.