Building Community Relationships - MN Ministry of Health (2023)

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Benefits of Community Participation
Principles of social commitment
Community Participation Model
main features

Involving community members in solving the problems that affect them is one of the fundamental principles of public health. The most effective way to achieve public health goals, particularly the elimination of health disparities, is to actively involve those who suffer from the problems in all aspects of their resolution. Community participation means involving community members in all activities, from identifying relevant problems and making decisions about how to address them, to evaluating and sharing results with the community.

Community involvement is a strong value and fundamental public health practice. The importance of community participation stems from the belief that the public has a right to participate. The public health community believes that by harnessing our "collective intelligence" and working together, we can more accurately identify problems and develop more elegant and effective solutions. We also believe that when people have had the opportunity to 'accept' the process, conflict is minimized.

Community involvement is an essential part of conducting a community health assessment and community health improvement plan, both required components of the local public health assessment and planning cycle.

related chapter:Assessment, planning and reporting

• Focusing on social justice: Community wisdom and science work together to ensure a more balanced set of political, social, economic, and cultural priorities, resulting in shared resources and shared power, and therefore equity and social justice.

• Help Design Services: Involving a wide range of community members in the early stages of a planning process will help shape services in a way that is culturally acceptable and best suited to specific needs.

• Helps build confidence: Inviting community group leaders will help demonstrate that their participation is valued and that their views are taken into account. This can help build trust, improve communication and openness to the use of services.

• Help with public relations.: More residents feel involved in community activities and decisions and can explain or interpret them positively to others. Disseminating knowledge through this informal approach will improve dissemination.

• Connect people and resources: Community engagement efforts improve connections between individuals, community organizations, businesses, and churches, which in turn leads to greater community support for public health.

• Develop new leaders: Inviting community members and community group leaders into planning processes helps identify advocates and develop leaders knowledgeable about public health issues.

• Create an opportunity for critical reflection.: Community engagement processes provide opportunities for collaborative and shared learning experiences and critical reflection that benefit from the wisdom of the community.

Before you begin community engagement...

1. Be clear about the purposes or goalsthe participation effort and the populations and/or communities you wish to involve. Those who wish to engage the community must be able to communicate to that community why their involvement is worthwhile.
2. get knowledgeabout community culture, economic conditions, social networks, political and power structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experiences with efforts by outside groups to engage them in various programs. Learn how the community perceives those who initiate participation activities. It is important to learn as much about the community as possible, both through data and by meeting with community leaders.

For a bond to form, it is necessary...

3. Join the community, build relationships, build trust, collaborate with formal and informal leaders, and engage community organizations and leaders to create community mobilization processes. Commitment is based on community support. Positive change is more likely to occur when community members are an integral part of the development and implementation of a program.
4. Remember and accept thisCollective self-determination is the responsibility and right of all people in a community. No external entity should assume that it can empower a community to act on its own behalf. The fact that an institution or organization fits into the community does not mean that it automatically belongs to the community. An organization belongs to the community when it is controlled by individuals or groups that are members of the community.

For engagement to work...

5. community partnershipit is necessary to generate changes and improve health. The American Heritage Dictionary defines association as "a relationship between individuals or groups characterized by mutual cooperation and responsibility for, say, the achievement of a specific goal."
6. All aspects of social engagement mustRecognize and respect the diversity of the community.. Awareness of a community's diverse cultures and other factors that influence diversity should be critical when planning, designing, and implementing approaches to community inclusion. Diversity can refer to economic, educational, professional, or health status, as well as differences in culture, language, race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual identity, mobility, literacy, or personal interests.
7. Community involvement can only be sustainedIdentify and mobilize common assets and strengthsIt isCommunity Capacity and Resource Developmentto make decisions and take action. Community members and institutions have the power and resources to create change and take action.
8. Organizations wishing to engage a community, as well as individuals wishing to effect change, must be willing to do so.Giving control of actions or interventions to the communityand be flexible enough to meet changing needs. Ultimately, community engagement is about facilitating community-driven action.
9. Community collaboration requiredlong term commitmentby the organization concerned and its partners. Long-term community participation and mobilization should be encouraged.

Those:CDC/ATSDR Community Involvement Committee. (2011).

There are numerous models of social engagement, civic engagement, community engagement and participation. Three examples are highlighted below.

Asset-Based Community Development Model

Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD)is a strategy developed by John McKnight and John Kretzmann that is used to discover the capabilities and resources of a community and mobilize those resources for the betterment of the community. The ABCD process focuses on a community's strengths and how those strengths can be applied to community improvement activities. For example, a typical needs analysis might ask, "What is the problem?" Rather, the ABCD paper asks, "How can our community synthesize its strengths into new combinations, new opportunity structures, new sources of revenue and control, and new opportunities?"

According to McKnight and Kretzmann, each community has a unique combination of assets on which to build its future. One can discover in any community a great and often surprising diversity of individual talents and productive capacities, few of which are mobilized for community-building purposes.

Association for the Community Health Model

OAssociation for the Improvement of Community Healthworks to strengthen community health through education, peer networking, and dissemination of practical tools. The association brings together and supports leaders in the healthcare, public health, community and philanthropic sectors to identify and achieve common community health goals. Addresses needs in a variety of community health focus areas, including:

• access to care: Primary and specialty care for underserved populations, insurance coverage and barriers to entry, disparities in care due to cultural and language differences, transportation, and more.
• Prevention and treatment of chronic diseases.: Community-Based Approaches to Enabling Health and Reversing the Course of Chronic Disease.
• community benefit: Tools and methods to improve collaborative practice in hospitals and health organizations.
• collaborative strategies: Effective partnerships built in healthy communities to achieve real gains in community health through health system strengthening.
• measurement and evaluation: Logic models, metrics, and scorecards to set goals, understand results, and communicate progress.

The Association for the Improvement of Community Health was conceived in 2002 as a successor to three national community health initiatives that were either nearing the end of their funding cycles or ripe for renewal and growth: the Community Care Network Demonstration Program, the ACT National Results Network and the Coalition for Healthier Cities and Communities. These three programs have made complementary contributions to community health since the mid-1990s, focusing on topics such as:

• Medical and preventive health care systems that ensure accessibility and meet local needs;
• Carefully plan and measure progress toward defined community health goals and;
• Broad community participation in solving systemic challenges to community health and social well-being.

The association took the key principles of each and combined them with additional components of effective community health practice to create a unified professional association with broad value as a center for networking and continuous learning. The Association for the Improvement of Community Health has hundreds of members from 47 states, the District of Columbia, and Canada.

Cultural complementarity model

In 1993, the successful Greater Twin Cities United Way Committee on Cultural Dynamics developed and adopted a blueprint for new ways of thinking and discussing culture and race that individuals and organizations could use to rebuild relationships.

Cultural complementarity means that different people work together, valuing the qualities that this diversity brings to the group to achieve common goals that would be difficult to achieve with separate efforts. Working in a circle with a consensus process, believing that all cultures and people have different areas of excellence and different challenges that when brought together complement each other. The purpose of this model is to provide clarity and direction to efforts to achieve equality among people of color through the practice of "circular consensus" that employs the principles outlined below:

• A breakdown of the rights and duties of all members.
• A concept of "power with" that leverages personal and community empowerment, recognizing multiple values, participatory negotiation, solidarity and a spirit of collaboration.
• An attitude of abundance, creativity, and the belief that unlimited collective power is shared, rather than a focus of scarcity of power and resources.
• A positive integrative approach to communication that eliminates dualistic thinking.
• A celebration of differences that develops from dialogue and continuous exchange between the participants.
• An experiential/active learning exchange based on personal experience that supports the premise that knowledge is a continuous and continuous process.
• Share evenly when creating future promotions.
• Working collectively to eradicate racism, believing that racism arises from fundamental illusions about human worth.

• commitment to the community
• Principles of social commitment
  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
• Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP)
  National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO)
• Die Community-Toolbox
  University of Kansas Task Force on Community Health and Development

Next:Colored and Native American populations