Esther Dyson is executive founder of Wellville, a ten-year, five-community project dedicated to showing the value of investing in health (as opposed to care). Wellville advises the five US-based Wellville communities on accelerating their own health initiatives, in Clatsop County, OR; Lake County, CA; Muskegon County, MI; North Hartford, CT; and Spartanburg, SC. Dyson is the W2W lead for Muskegon, and is actively involved in overall policy and fundraising for the project. Wellville favors implementation over innovation: applying proven approaches at scale in small communities where scale is relatively easy to achieve in terms of resources and political buy-in. Each community sets its own priorities and goals around issues such as obesity/diabetes, mental health, smoking, addiction and overall human capacity and health disparities; W2W assists in finding partners and funders and in managing accountability.
