Welcome

Dear friends,

Since our founding in 2003, the Massachusetts Coalition for Healthy Communities (MCHC) has proven that informed and engaged citizens can chart a new way forward for our communities and our Commonwealth.

MCHC was founded on the principle that truly healthy communities exist only when all their parts are healthy and working together. Healthy communities also depend on the health of the larger systems of which they are a part. But on virtually all fronts, the systems that sustain us are in crisis.

For this reason, we believe that people concerned with different aspects of our continuing social, economic, and environmental crises must work together on compassionate, cooperative, and cross-cutting responses for our common well-being.

Working across demographic and issue boundaries provides an antidote to the divide-and-conquer process that forces deserving constituencies to compete for crumbs. We don't have to settle for narrowly-defined victories and merely less-harsh defeats. In fact, we can no longer afford to. Instead, we must forge cross-issue movements for meaningful and urgent transformative action.

MCHC believes achieving healthy communities requires a healthy and vibrant grassroots democracy that allows people to come together to exercise more control over the conditions under which they live. To maintain our ability to speak the truth without hesitation, we have steered clear of entanglements with the prevailing power structure. We often found ourselves the only voice raising concerns about a deal that was moving forward on Beacon Hill without any questions being asked by incumbent politicians or established public interest groups. We have often had a surprising impact simply by raising our voice and telling the truth.

With developing crises at the global, national, state and local levels, MCHC is increasingly focused on the strategic leverage point of advancing community-rooted solutions locally and across the state. We invite you to join with us to imagine and achieve a proactive, positive vision of a healthy, just, and sustainable Commonwealth for all.

Eli Beckerman, MCHC Project Coordinator