Beyond Services and Prescriptions: Reimagining Healthy Lifestyle Centers as Cooperative Enterprises

Abstract

While the health-enhancing benefits of exercise and good nutrition have been well documented, the ability of health professionals to encourage healthier lifestyle behaviors among those they serve continues to prove challenging. Creating the conditions where healthier living can both occur and be sustained requires thinking beyond the traditional provision of services and prescriptions that occur in healthcare settings. Healthy Lifestyle Centers are emerging as a way of deploying lifestyle medicine practices. Turning these centers into cooperative businesses has the potential to make them more effective. Cooperative business principles are well established, and they enable individuals to become makers and producers of their own healthy lifestyles, providing a greater opportunity for sustained lifestyles changes. The purpose of this article is to further examine the role of engagement practices and coproduction as they relate to cooperative business models and to propose a framework for a Cooperative Healthy Lifestyle Center.