Check out past issues of Community Threads

Get to ACTION to transform health in your community

In this issue of PoP Health's 2024 newsletter series, we move into the second phase of our C.A.P.E. process: Action Planning. Specifically, we share the five phases of PoP Health’s Action Planning Framework.

By working through these five phases of action planning thoughtfully, you can chart a path to inspiring and mobilizing concrete, meaningful action and transforming health in your community. Action planning can have many components, but ultimately, it is most important that planning ends with intentional, purposeful action.

This issue of Community Threads walks you through action planning, FAQ style: What is it? What are some ways to think about it? What questions should I be asking myself about it?

HOW to collaborate across your collaborative

Continuing PoP Health's 2024 newsletter series, we delve deeper into part two of the first phase of our C.A.P.E. process: Community Collaboration, answering the “Yes, but HOW?” question.

Read on to learn about tips, strategies, and resources focused on collaborating across your collaborative in a way that facilitates intentional, strategic, collective ACTION.

This issue of Community Threads answers the question of HOW to collaborate across your collaborative: How do I facilitate effective collaboration that benefits all member organization? What are some specific strategies for collaborating across your collaborative? What are some resources to help me collaborate across my collaborative?

Collaborating across your collaborative: helpful frameworks and questions to ask yourself

In this issue of PoP Health's 2024 newsletter series, we spring into part two of the first phase of our C.A.P.E. process: Community Collaboration. Specifically, we focus on collaborating across your collaborative.

Collaboration is more than convening partners on a regular basis or having a shared vision and mission - true collaboration moves beyond sharing information and learning from one another, and requires taking intentional, strategic, collective ACTION.

This issue of Community Threads provides frameworks and questions to facilitate collaboration to ensure your coalition has a strong foundation to support meaningful strategy and action planning.

HOW to put community voices in the driver’s seat

As we continue PoP Health’s 2024 newsletter series, we’ll dive deeper into the first phase of our C.A.P.E. process: Community Collaboration, answering the “Yes, but HOW?” question.

Read on to learn about tips, strategies, and resources focused on collaborating with community members and placing more power in their hands.

This issue of Community Threads answers the question of HOW to collaborate with community members: How do I build lasting relationships with community members? What are some specific strategies for collaborating with community members? What are some resources to help me collaborate with community members?

Putting community voices in the driver’s seat

In our first issue of PoP Health’s 2024 special newsletter series, we’ll dive into the first phase of our C.A.P.E. process: Community Collaboration - specifically, collaborating with community members.

Read on to learn why we don’t love the terms community engagement and community empowerment + our favorite framework capturing the spectrum from community engagement to ownership.

Ultimately, collaborating with community members is about deep listening and working with community members to act on what we hear from them in order to co-create the transformation we want to see in our communities.

This issue of Community Threads walks you through collaborating with community members, FAQ style: What is it? What are some ways to think about it? What questions should I be asking myself about it?

Bringing calmness into our work with community coalitions (and into our 2024 newsletter series!)

What does calmness look like in our work with community coalitions? When we are intentional and apply helpful frameworks, tools, and strategies, it can really help us work towards the vision we have for our communities without the “frantic energy” that can cloud and overly complicate the work.

It is in this spirit of calmness that we here at PoP Health are structuring our upcoming Community Threads 2024 Newsletter Series around PoP Health's C.A.P.E. process, with each month focused on a different phase in the process: Community collaboration, Action planning, Participatory evaluation, and Effective storytelling.

This issue of Community Threads includes more on these phases and what you can expect to learn via the newsletter series (and the impact it will have on your work!).

Transforming Health Through Community Coalitions

One of my greatest joys in 2023 was partnering with coalitions to transform health in their communities through policy and systems changes.

And I'm thrilled to kick off the new year with a head start on PoP Health's most important 2024 goal: to share what we've learned with others, especially those who are leading, participating in, and working with community coalitions.

Launching in February and continuing through spring and into the summer, our new biweekly newsletter series will cover frameworks, tools, and strategies that coalitions can put into action to improve public health.

Please join us on this learning journey! This issue of Community Threads introduces our upcoming series, and make sure you subscribe with the form above to receive our tips and tools directly in your inbox.

Why we need to tell more stories

Storytelling holds immense power.

Many times, listening to and sharing stories can be more persuasive than data as we bring community members into our efforts to improve public health.

This issue of Community Threads discusses three examples of how storytelling impacts, informs, and involves community members and coalitions.

The perils of trying to be everything to everyone

The reality is, we can't be everything to everyone.

There's going to be a segment of the community who will always be against us, no matter what we do.

Instead of trying to sway the folks who will never be swayed, what if we turned our focus elsewhere?

Let’s say 20% of the community are strongly with us and 20% of the community will always be against us, no matter what we do. That leaves 60%.

And we might think 60% is an overestimate of those "in the middle," but what if it's actually an underestimate? How many people are truly in the middle and how many simply have "strong opinions, lightly held"?

This issue of Community Threads explores these questions, why it's helpful to focus our outreach to this segment of the community, and the power of "niching down" even further to target and tailor our messages and efforts.

A non-cringey survey that helps coalitions understand themselves

Surveys get a bad rap. And believe me, I get it. We’re often asking people to take surveys without providing the necessary context for them to buy into why their input is valuable OR for them to believe (and for there to actually be) changes made based on the results.

But partnership surveys avoid those pitfalls. We survey members of a coalition - who are already bought into the work AND who want to actively use the results to inform their work.

This issue of Community Threads describes these surveys, what we ask in them, and how useful (and non-cringey!) they can be.

Leveraging the power of in-person gathering

From the energy and sense of community that can come simply from sitting around the same table to the power of "slideline" 1:1 conversations that occur during these gatherings, there is much to be said for the power of in-person gathering.

And with great power comes great responsibility.

How can we be intentional about leveraging the power of these (sometimes rare) opportunities to be in the same physical space together?

This issue of Community Threads offers some concrete ideas and suggestions.

How to keep people engaged in community health improvement efforts

Have you ever struggled to keep people engaged in a communityhealth improvement effort (or any effort, for that matter)?

Whether you are recruiting members or trying to hold onto the ones you already have, what’s the secret to keeping folks engaged?

This issue of Community Threads outlines how happiness researcher Arthur Brooks's concepts of earned success and serving other people could be the answer to this question.

The power of a storytelling sentence

There is a time for being still and listening, and there is a time for telling a story.

When it comes to community health improvement, we often find ourselves in situations where we need to tell a compelling story, whether that is to community members or policymakers or funders.

We often use data (both quantitative and qualitative) to tell this story, and powerful data visualizations can really help make this information digestible.

But visualizations only tell a story if you can interpret them effectively.

This issue of Community Threads describes the the immense power of a storytelling sentence in helping your audience do just this.

The shifts that come from listening

Recently, for work I'm doing in DC around systems-level shifts to school mental health, we brought together youth to generate ideas around how to improve youth engagement in the school context.

The ideas that came up? Nothing like what we would have heard from adults. Here’s a sampling:

• "Having an area where we can take a break/chill"

• "I WANT A MENTAL HEALTH DAY"

• "Having more relatable/trusted adults"; "Respect is a two way street"

This issue of Community Threads describes the shifts that come from truly listening (not just shifting our solutions, but even how we define problems!) and ends with a call to practice this elusive skill.

15% and 15x solutions

Sometimes we get stuck brainstorming because it feels like the only way to change things is big, huge, systems-level transformation and we feel powerless to make that happen.

On the other hand, sometimes we get stuck brainstorming because all we can come up with are ideas that would make small changes on the margins, but nothing that feels big enough to create real change.

The reality is, we need to brainstorm and move forward on both fronts.

This issue of Community Threads describes how we can do just that, using two Liberating Structures facilitation techniques that pair well: 15% and 15x solutions.

The value of ONE right door

You may have heard the phrase “no wrong door” before.

The idea (in theory) is that every door in the community should be the right door to access key public health/other services and supports.

But in my work in children's mental health, I have heard from multiple different communities that the problem isn't nowhere to turn but too many places to turn - without sufficient information or support to understand what services/supports are actually available to them and suited to their needs.

What people often need is one right door - someone or something to help them navigate through all that's available to find the right fit for them.

This issue of Community Threads describes how we might create this one right door.

Just do it. Then iterate.

Whatever idea you’ve been mulling over, consider, planning for…just do it.

It may not always be that simple and there may be valid reasons why just doing it isn’t possible. But there are also many cases where we could “just do it” and perfectionism or fear get the in the way.

This issue of Community Threads describes the value of just doing it, then iterating. Fail fast. Get your “first pancake” out of the way. Learn as much as you can from the experience and then revise, making it better each time.

A fish, an elephant, and an iceberg: Orienting community towards root causes and systems

When a community is trying to address a public health problem, the immediate causes are often the most apparent.

But to truly transform health in communities, we need to move beyond the immediate. We need to 1) drill down to root causes and 2) fly up for a systems wide view.

This issue of Community Threads describes three tools to help ourselves and out communities do this:

• A fishbone root cause analysis diagram, paired with asking “5 Whys”

• An elephant analogy that helps us take a systems wide view

• An iceberg model to help us tackle systems problems

Simplify your messaging with the Kindergartener test

How do you explain public health to Kindergartener? Public health is pretty abstract (preventing something before it happens means there's nothing to show!) and I needed to explain it to Kindergartners-3rd graders for my daughter’s elementary school career fair. Yikes.

I was momentarily stumped and walking around the house looking for a good prop to illustrate the upstream/downstream story when I came across my daughter's marble maze. It was fun and colorful enough to draw in the kids AND - with the addition of a small round paint sponge I found - had all the elements I needed to illustrate the story.

This issue of Community Threads describes how I told the story and the many excellent ideas the kids had that I didn’t anticipate but helped tell an even better story about public health and what it does!

Too many partners, too little time, one nifty tool

When you’re part of a multi-component initiative with many partners engaged in many different activities (or even part of a large organization with many departments/teams), it can be challenging to truly understand the work of other partners (or even other departments/teams within the same organization, when your organization is big!).

Logic models, summary descriptions, and annual reports only go so far in providing a true understanding of how the work looks, sounds, and feels on the ground where it's happening.

What can we do instead?

This issue of Community Threads describes a nifty tool you can use to understand different partners’ activities, 5 engaging minutes at a time.

Hearing vs. Listening to community

Hearing is defined as “the process, function, or power of perceiving sound” whereas listening is “to pay attention to sound; to hear something with thoughtful attention: give consideration”.

Notice the difference? Community voice isn’t enough if we merely hear it, but don’t listen to and act on it.

This issue of Community Threads outlines some ways we’ve put this into practice, including:

• Reflecting what we’re hearing from community back to the community;

• Directly linking community input to our strategies/plans and making these connections explicit;

• Holding ourselves accountable to community by asking them whether they felt listened to and their input acted upon - and modifying our approach to reflect what we learn.