The New York State Association of County Health Officials (NYSACHO) recently voted to provide subscriptions to the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice for all local health departments in New York State as an association membership benefit. As association decisions go, this one was an easy one to make. NYSACHO has a long tradition of fostering leadership development in local public health departments. Offering our members the opportunity to keep current on the best in research and practices in this area is what can only be described as a win-win for both the individual members and the association as a whole. Benefits such as these are value-added items for our membership and help to make our association strong.

We're often asked, "How did you build a strong state association?" Ask any two SACHO members their experiences and you're sure to get different answers. I could go into the details of how we "grew" NYSACHO into the strong association it is today, but I don't think the important question is "how." The important question is "Why?" Why have a strong local public health association?

We are a diverse group of 58 local health departments here in New York. Our largest department, New York City, serves a population of over 8 million people. Our smallest, Hamilton County, serves just over 5,000. Our public health leaders come from different backgrounds-doctors and nurses, environmental health directors, and administrators. Our communities are urban, rural, suburban and ex-urban. We border five states and Canada and have many departments that need to address public health issues across those geographical boundaries. Over the past few years, our communities faced the emergence of West Nile virus, an E. coli outbreak at a county fair, rioting at a massive Woodstock Concert, and a veritable encyclopedia of diseases, from SARS, monkey pox, pertussis, rabies, meningitis, to Lyme disease. We deal with chronic disease issues too: tobacco control, heart disease, asthma, diabetes, cancer, and so on. We also provide numerous direct care services: home care, flu clinics, maternal/child health visits, and the like. That list doesn't include September 11, which is in a category of its own, and in its aftermath, has created a whole new set of urgent public health needs above and beyond our regular scope of work. Every state is unique and yet every local health department in the nation has probably been involved in addressing some, if not all, of the public health concerns I just enumerated. Do you still want to know why we need a strong association?

NYSACHO has been our lifeline to one another throughout this tumultuous period in public health. Over 12 years ago, a core group of association members decided that they wanted the association to move beyond promoting a legislative agenda and began to build the capacity to offer more to our members. More meant an increased focus on education and training. More meant strengthening ties with our state health department and other partner agencies. More meant finding the means to acquire a staff to support the services our members identified as needs for their own departments. And more really meant creating an organization to support a strong local public health infrastructure.

Each year NYSACHO offers a three-day membership retreat for our local health leaders. We host an annual public health conference along with a multitude of other training events every year. We work with our state health department to provide orientation for newly appointed local health officials. Our association's executive director often meets personally with both new and long-time commissioners and public health directors to help them address specific concerns. NYSACHO sponsors participation in the Northeast Public Health Leadership Institute, which is conducted by the School of Public Health at the University at Albany. We also support attendance by local health department officials at a variety of national conferences. Many of our activities are supported through grant funds from our state health department, which also recognizes the value in fostering local public health leadership. We have a small, dedicated staff, all of whom work hard to carry-out the day-to-day activities of the association. Technology has also played a key role in enhancing our association efforts. E-mail, broadcast faxes, conference calls, satellite broadcasts, and, now, videoconferencing have opened up new avenues for communication and education. The ability to communicate with one another and policy makers at the state and national level while remaining in our own agencies is an enormous benefit to our association.

The results of all these efforts are a robust, active membership, increased collaboration with our state health department and new partnerships with other health-related organizations, academia, and community-based organizations.

Perhaps most importantly, through NYSACHO, we are peers, we are colleagues, and we are friends. This isn't important just because it's a "nice thing to do." It's important because when we are faced with a West Nile virus, or a SARS, or a September 11, we know one another. We know we can call on each other and help will come. We know that we can pool our collective wisdom to address the public health challenges we face as individuals and come up with better solutions together. And we know that our communities, collectively and individually, are better served because of these relationships. That's what this publication is also about and why we subscribe to it, because that's what NYSACHO is about, too.