The Bloomington and Peoria Invest Health teams hosted a day long peer exchange event. The event at the Gateway Building on the Peoria Riverfront included more than 100 people from the region. They shared ideas and strategies to improve overall community health.
Ross Black is Peoria’s Community Development Director. He says they’ve identified an area of deficiency as lacking non-profit developers able to do multiple types of development.
“The goal today is to have organizations from other communities come in and tell us how they did their work so we could then try and replicate that in Peoria and also in Bloomington," Black said.
Black says the Invest Health Teams meet again Friday to review ideas from the peer exchange.
The Bloomington and Peoria Invest Health teams’ work is funded through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It’s intended to bring together diverse leaders from mid-sized U.S. cities.