ADVOCACYDENVER will participate in the Denver Broncos’ premiere Health and Wellness EXPO over Labor Day Weekend. The EXPO is a first for the Broncos, who are pairing up with UCHealth, to impact the health and well-being of their fans statewide.
An Interview with Catherine Strode
ADVOCACYDENVER will be participating in the Denver Broncos’ premiere Health and 
Wellness EXPO over Labor Day Weekend.
The EXPO is a first for the Broncos, who are pairing up with UCHealth, to impact the health and well-being of their fans statewide. It began with the recent renaming of their Training Center and is extending to a long-term health campaign. The EXPO, held at Sports Authority Field, will feature free medical screenings provided by UCHealth. ADVOCACYDENVER’s booth will feature: demonstrations of modified exercise, healthy snacks, and exercise videos.
In this interview with Catherine Strode, Broncos Vice President of Sales and Marketing Dennis Moore says the EXPO is only the beginning of many future Broncos’ large scale health events.
How was the vision of this partnership created?
“The vision of it goes back quite a ways in terms of the Broncos’ internal conversations. We’ve been working down this path around what role can we play in the health and wellness of our fans? Obviously, we’re a football team so that effort can only go so far. Who we partner with in the health care space is a critical component in us making a positive impact in health and wellness. We’ve articulated our vision. What we want to accomplish is, at some point in the future, being able to say we have the healthiest fan base in the NFL. That’s a big goal but we felt great synergy with the leadership team at UCHealth and how they want to take a leadership stance in health and wellness. By combining what the Broncos’ brand and our fan base bring, with their expertise in health and wellness, we had a partnership that can start to look pretty special in what we do and how we go about starting to make a positive impact for our fans and anybody who lives in Colorado.”
Are you using the renaming of the training facility to launch the health and wellness campaign?
“The renaming of our training center to ‘UCHealth Training Center’ is very much a symbolic part of a partnership that has many tentacles beyond the naming rights of our training center. That is obviously the one that we led with because it’s going to get the most publicity. That is a significant asset for bringing attention to UCHealth and to our partnership but that is not the ‘meat of the bone’, if you will. That is the public dynamic to it. The majority of the health and wellness work, and how we’re going to partner on a lot of these initiatives, is going to be done through events. We’re going to be doing health and wellness digital challenges where we will be asking our fans to sign up and do daily activities to earn points and compete against each other in health and wellness challenges. Although the facility and the naming rights brings the most significance in terms of awareness to UCHealth, that is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the programming and activations we’ll be doing with UCHealth.”
Is the health and wellness campaign focusing on one specific physical condition?
“With all of the service lines that UCHealth supports, it would be unfair to rule anything out at this point because we’re so new into the partnership. Their organization is learning a lot about us and what are passion points for the Broncos’ organization in terms of those issues. We would like to get involved in: Breast Cancer awareness, or Alzheimer’s, or domestic violence. I think all of those things, even football specific – concussion awareness – and what that means to the vitality of football, are on the table. As we get this partnership off the ground, it is less about one particular issue. More than anything right now, it’s how do our two organizations start to make a wide canvas across our state and bring more awareness to overall health and wellness platforms. How do we get somebody who is making unhealthy decisions get off the couch and start leading an active lifestyle? How do we get families to start paying attention to healthier recipes? How do we start to institute some workout programs and allow our fans to compete against each other? How do we create an impact that is year-round and not singularly focused on one event but really is tailored to create an impact throughout the course of the year? We are bringing our players, our cheerleaders, our dieticians, our athletic trainers, to the table where people are paying attention because it’s the right talent delivering the right content.”
Who are you targeting in this health and wellness campaign?
“It is not focused on 53 players but focused on our millions of fans. If we can enable 500 fans to get screened, that ordinarily would not get screened, that’s what the partnership is all about: early detection and wellness exercises. It is providing access and motivation and education to our entire fan base. It’s designed to get the messaging out to as many of our fans as possible, whether they’re in our seats, or whether they never come to our games. The focus is how do we touch as many people as possible.”
Catherine Strode is AdvocacyDenver’s Policy Outreach Specialist. Formerly Coordinator of the Health Care Advocacy Program, she holds a Masters degree in Public Administration with an emphasis in Health Care Policy. Catherine publishes Policy Perspective, featuring interviews with state policy makers on issues that affect the work and mission of AdvocacyDenver.