Essential Practices

Health Equity Focus

An intentional focus on eliminating avoidable and unjust health inequities affected by social, economic, and environmental conditions.

All people should have access to opportunities for healthy living. Policies and practices aimed at promoting health equity will not immediately eliminate all health inequities, but will provide a foundation for moving closer to the goal of allowing each person to achieve their full health potential. A health equity focus acknowledges that inequities are avoidable and unjust, and that they must be a priority of community change strategies. To achieve health equity, we must address the systems, power imbalances, and processes that perpetuate differences in health outcomes for at-risk groups such as people of color, people with disabilities, people with lower incomes, and older adults.

Resources:

• Lessons for Leaders: Community Engagement for Equity (p. 32)
• Growing a Movement: Engaging the Community Drove Action and Equity (p. 15)
• Investing in Healthy Community Change: Addressing Equity is Important for Impact (p. 13)
• From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Promoting Health Equity A Resource to Help Communities Address Social Determinants of Health

Community Engagement

An intentional process in which community members are engaged in leading the planning and implementation of solutions within their own communities.

By working collaboratively with people who share a common geography, special interest, or similar situations, community change strategies are grounded in people’s lived experiences and provide opportunities to take positive actions that are meaningful to them. Community engagement and leadership go beyond simply informing and surveying, community members determining, advocating for, shaping, and helping implement solutions.

Resources:

• Growing a Movement: Engaging the Community Drove Action and Equity (p. 19)
• Lessons for Leaders: Engaging Community for Equity (p. 32)
• Authentic Community Engagement Requires Vulnerability
• From IAP2 — Public Participation Spectrum
• From Community Commons — Engaging People with Lived Experience

Community Leadership

A capacity-building and leadership approach that shares power and influence among engaged partners in order to produce actions and outcomes that are generated by and best serve a group rather than one or two strong or vocal leaders.

Collaborative leadership recognizes the synergy and value of bringing together the different strengths and experiences of individuals. It inspires and creates the conditions for teams, organizations, and/or communities to effectively and creatively address shared goals and leverage opportunities for greater social impact. This includes creating opportunities for others to offer their unique perspectives and talents, speak up when they have problems or solutions, take initiative, make appropriate decisions, work with others, and share responsibility for the health of the team, coalition, or community.

Resources:

• Lessons for Leaders: Identify and Cultivate Leadership (p. 10)
• 3P Model for Collaboration
• Community Collaboration Services
• Communities in Action: Flint, MI
• From the Tamarack Institute — The Collaboration Spectrum

Sustainable Thinking

A mindset that considers the interconnectedness of the social, environmental, and economic assets and opportunities that are necessary for successful and lasting community change.

Sustaining community change begins during the planning and early action steps and continues throughout the life of an initiative. Partnerships that think about sustaining their work long before the end of a project or grant period are more likely to see their investments of time, effort, money, and passion preserved, renewed, replicated, and continued at an impactful scale. Sustainable thinking carefully considers the people and relationships necessary to continue a successful initiative by looking across sectors, organizations, and community members. Sustainable community change requires coordinated strategies that connect policies, systems, and built and social environments to support health and quality of life in the long run. Community partnerships must look for ways to leverage human, in-kind, and financial resources from within and outside their community.

Resources:

• Sustainability Framework
• Lessons for Leaders: Create Structure(s) and Multiple Paths to What You Value Most (p. 18), and Share the Money and Opportunity (p. 22)
• Investing in Healthy Community Change: Relationships with Funders Matter (p.19)
• Sustainable Thinking: Destination or a State of Being?
• From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — A Sustainability Planning Guide for Healthy Communities

Culture of Learning

Ingrained, ongoing opportunities in a community to improve effectiveness and impact through partnerships, continual assessment of initiatives, and collaborative sharing and learning.

Leaders and members of community-change initiatives grow when they are continually motivated to learn. Collaborative approaches to community change are complex, so leaders at all levels of experience and skill may be challenged by the rigors of the work. They need opportunities to learn, build skills, develop supportive relationships, access new resources, recharge their motivation, and to simply remind themselves that they are part of something larger than their daily experience. Sharing learnings and exchanging ideas with peers in other communities can create a mutually beneficial network and help grow the healthy communities field. Collaborative groups also build shared knowledge across their members through learning opportunities including webinars, workshops, field trips, and conferences. Finally, partnerships learn by routinely assessing the progress of their work and its impact within the communities they serve.

Resources:

• Growing a Movement: Connections to the Larger Movement Enhanced Local Action (p. 15)
• Lessons for Leaders: Test, Then Invest (p. 51)
• Communities in Action: Collaborative Learning and Networking Across New Jersey
• Building a Culture of Health Through Collaborative Learning
• From the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Evaluation Framework

Strategic Communication

A purpose-driven process of communication that aligns and tailors narratives, messages, and tactics with communities’ priorities and audiences’ values and strives for an evolving dialogue.

Strategic communication requires intentional planning to implement strategies across various forms of communication, such as newsletters, press releases, reports, brochures, and social media. Communication goals should serve the needs of the community, and may include eliciting change, generating action, creating understanding, informing an audience, or imparting a certain idea or point of view. Achieving these requires the ability to not only understand the values and worldviews that are shaping narratives within a community, but also the ability to create messages that resonate with specific audiences. Well-planned, purposeful, and reciprocal communication can help partnerships realize their potential while building quality relationships, mutual understanding, and a shared commitment to action.

Resources:

• Narratives for Health Guide and Transformative Narratives for Socially Connected Communities (p. 23), co-produced with the Narratives for Health Initiative
• Improve Your Message by Asking Questions – Especially These Questions
• Advance Your Work by Telling Stories
• From the Public Health Collaborative — Strategies for Developing Culturally Drive Public Health Communications
• From Frameworks Institute — Framing Fundamentals, What is Framing?