A New Year's wish + invitation

Thank you for being a part of our Community Threads family! Having this space to share with you all and reading your emails about what you’ve gleaned from these newsletters have meant the world to me this past year.

So as we close the chapter on 2024 and enter 2025, I wanted to share with you a new year’s wish + invitation:

We recognize 2025 is a new year with significant challenges - some old, some new. And we believe wholeheartedly that it is at the intersection of hope and action that we can work together to transform health in our communities.

In that spirit, here at PoP Health, we’ll be launching two new projects in 2025 - action planning workshops and technical assistance packages for community health coalitions + an initiative focused on putting political and economic power back in the hands of communities.

We’ll share with you along the way right here in our Community Threads newsletters. Please keep those replies coming - I love hearing from you!

In the meantime, as we find new ways to take action together, I remain ever grateful to you - thank you for reading.

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"The art of gathering" and the importance of grounding people in their purpose

Have you facilitated a meeting before? Or hosted a party?

What runs through your mind when you’re planning a gathering?

Are you a “chill host” (hint: Priya Parker, in her book, “The Art of Gathering”, suggests you shouldn’t be!)?

Source: https://www.priyaparker.com/book-art-of-gathering

Do you ask yourself why you’re gathering people (and then why again and again, until you drill down to something meaningful) and use your answer to shape your event (hint: This will help you host a meaningful, memorable gathering!).

I was invited to speak at a Comprehensive School Mental Health State Policy Academy in Charlotte, North Carolina last month. At the start of one of the days, in small groups, the meeting facilitator had us answer what I think might be the most powerful icebreaker question I’ve been asked - “Who do you dedicate your learning here today to?”

The answers from the members of our small group were vulnerable, beautiful, and heartfelt - from stories of loss to children going off to college to reflections on one’s community. It was an invitation to not just think about our school mental health work and the impact it could have, but to ground ourselves in what this work means to us.

My answer surprised even me - as I thought about school mental health and who I’d want to dedicate my learning to, my thoughts gravitated to the people closest to me who had the least amount of support for their mental health as children - my parents.

This opening question is a powerful example of a point Priya Parker underscores in her book - don’t open with logistics. Get to those eventually, but they are a buzzkill as an opener. Instead, think about the deepest “why” of why this gathering is taking place and use that to plan a powerful opening. (Note: This goes for endings too, don’t end with thank yous! Get those in along the way, but to close, get people back to the core “why” of the gathering and inspire them to make a change - however small - as a result.)

Speaking of thought-provoking openers - while I was in Charlotte for this meeting, I wandered through the city and checked out the amazing public art sprinkled throughout, and this sculpture at the entrance to a park really caught my fancy, so I had to take a quick picture. What a way to invite people to think about their time in this outdoor gathering space.

“Life is an Open Book” by Brad Spencer in The Green, Charlotte, North Carolina

Every time we come together with others, whatever shape or form that takes, however casual or formal, we have an opportunity to elevate that gathering - from something mundane to something extraordinary. Take your shot. And shoot me a note to tell me all about it!

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Why we need to tell more stories

I’ve always loved stories - reading them, writing them, dancing them, hearing them.

One of the greatest joys of my work these days is partnering with community coalitions to tell their stories and the stories of their community members.

Narrative - that is, storytelling - holds immense power. Just in the last couple weeks, this has come up in three completely different projects PoP Health is working on:

• I was in Pittsburgh last week for the one-year celebration of implementation of the BIRTH Plan. A key part of PoP Health's role in this work is helping share the impact of implementing the plan in ways that resonate with community members. We’re lucky to be working with an amazing team over at Impact Aligned as well as our partners at Healthy Start Pittsburgh who are leading this work. All of us had many conversations where we grappled with how best to share our evaluation/learning data with partners and community, and ultimately realized we didn’t just want to share data - we wanted to tell a story. So, at the suggestion of our friends at Impact Aligned, we’re pivoting away from the idea of a traditional dashboard and instead considering storyboarding five key “impact stories” about the implementation of the BIRTH Plan and progress/outcomes to date that will be turned into videos - using data visualizations with an audio voiceover to tell a literal story. We are so excited about trying this approach and think it has the potential to be much more relatable, compelling, and easy-to-understand for community members.

• Earlier this week, I was at a convening of a multi-partner school behavioral health collaborative in DC, and one of the parent advocates around the table brought up the two key perspectives she thought were missing from our table: a media person and a historian. This really struck me because these are not common roles brought up around public health focused coalition tables. But they should be - especially when we are talking about transforming communities through policy and systems change. This work cannot be divorced from the history of the community - we need to acknowledge, account for, and learn from history (history, if you will). We also need to share our stories - the stories we are informed by, the stories we are shaping, the stories of our impact and our failures too. So then it feels like of course we should have historians and media/communications professionals around our tables.

• My colleague over at AES Consulting and I are working on a report related to cancer prevention communications and there are so many examples of the power of personal stories - one of them is about how colonoscopies increased 20% nationwide after Katie Couric received her first colonoscopy live on the Today show (i.e. “the Couric Effect”), a phenomenon I’m sure was also driven by her own moving personal story about her husband’s death from colon cancer. Similarly, when Magic Johnson went public with testing positive for HIV, this led to an uptick in testing in minority communities known as the “Magic Johnson effect”. Personal stories can often be more persuasive than data. I love the example of “deep canvassing” from door-to-door political campaigning. The strategy involves, first, a LOT of listening, followed by the canvasser trying to get the person at the door to reflect on a situation in their own life that might parallel the experience of someone the canvasser is hoping they can get the person to relate to - and it’s been found to be quite effective! (This is a strategy I learned about via the book Persuaders. Read my takeaways, which include a more detailed description of deep canvassing, here).
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I’ve written about the power of narrative before (preview: I discuss in detail the TV show New Amsterdam and also share a fun exchange from when I met Atul Gawande at a book talk) and more recently the power of a storytelling sentence. I’m sure I’ll have more to share about the power of stories in the future too - it’s really a thread that runs through all aspects of my work and life.

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The perils of trying to be everything to everyone

I was facilitating a coalition meeting recently and the conversation ended up going in circles for a bit - someone would propose an idea for a message or an activity and someone else would respond explaining why that wouldn’t resonate with or convince members of their community.

After a few rounds of this, someone interjected with a powerful idea - it’s one I’d heard before and you likely have too, but it bears repeating: 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% - maybe we can focus on them instead of the 20% we’ll never be able to sway.

The percentages may change based on the issue, but the underlying concept does not: we can’t be everything to everyone. If we try to get to that 20% who will always be against us, we’ll either get stuck or put out a diluted message/program/policy in an attempt to appeal to everyone - but end up appealing to no one at all (including the 20% that was originally with us!).

Now, Reader, I know you might be thinking, “But it’s not just 20% at the far end of the spectrum!” Especially on politically charged topics, it might seem like almost everyone has a strong opinion, leaving hardly anyone “in the middle”. But what do we actually mean by people "in the middle”? One of my favorite thinkers/authors, Anand Giridharadas, has suggested that “moderates don’t exist”.

Moderation, he says, is about someone having a “less baked” or less certain viewpoint . It does not mean their view is exactly in the middle of the two extremes (I love Anand’s analogy for this – if I am undecided about whether I want a pizza or a burger, that doesn’t generally mean I want a pizzaburger.). Which is not to say that no one has a view exactly in the middle, some people do. But many others have “strong opinions, lightly held” – i.e., approached in the right ways, they can be persuaded.

So who is your 60%? Do they have “strong opinions, lightly held”? Can they be persuaded?

Of course, even within that 60%, not everyone is the same.

I studied health communications in grad school and taught an intro health communications course for several years - one of the key topics we covered was audience segmentation. This is something that commercial marketers (think cars and shoes and soda) do really well. They’re not trying to appeal to everyone with a particular message - their message is targeted and tailored to the particular values and perspectives of a narrow segment of the audience they’ve identified and spent a lot of time understanding. And if they want to appeal to a different segment of the audience, they’ll have a different message in a different channel.

Of course, the coalitions we work with and most public health organizations don’t have the resources that commercial marketers do.

But we can still think critically about who exactly our audience is and what segment of that audience we are trying to reach with a particular message or intervention.

As we often hear in the consulting world, there are “riches in the niches.” When you “niche down” and narrow your audience and services, you can speak to that very specific audience in a way that resonates deeply and makes people recognize that you understand and can address their specific needs.

It’s the same for any work or communication we undertake, whether as a coalition or an organization - we can’t be everything to everyone, but if we “niche down,” we might be surprised at just how effective we can be.

What is your favorite example of the power of “niching down” (or the perils of being everything to everyone)? Let me know!

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Leveraging the power of in-person gathering

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of in-person gathering on the professional end as well. After a long summer vacation, this Fall has been a period of reconvening in person.

Last month, we had an in-person kick off for a DC School Behavioral Health Consortium that drove home the energy and sense of community that can come simply from sitting around the same table. I also loved the icebreaker the meeting conveners used to set the stage for our time together - they shared a collage of different images representing collaboration and asked each person, as we went around the room for introductions, to share which image resonated most with them and why. What a great way to orient the group to the reason we had come together and unearth some key distinctions and nuances in how each person at the table might approach this work. We’ve gotten used to “setting the stage” activities in virtual spaces, but they are just as valuable in in-person gatherings.

Last week, we had our second annual set of Ignite presentations and data sensemaking sessions for our work (in partnership with the Center for Health and Healthcare in Schools at GW) as the Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning partner for an antiracist, whole child development initiative in DC schools. Although this kind of sharing of our work and making sense of data visuals could, technically speaking, be done virtually, there is something about the power of being seated in a circle and lending our full attention to the discussion at hand that is hard to recreate on Zoom. There is also perhaps something even more powerful about the “sideline” conversations that occur between partner organizations during an in-person gathering, especially one that includes time to share meals together and catch up informally, as we did on both days of this convening. One of our partners emailed us after the event, “I wanted to thank you all for such an impactful convening this week. It was really inspiring to be around such a thoughtful group of educators/advocates and to be able to more deeply connect the dots across the entire project. I was even able to leave with immediate steps to further collaborate with [two of the other partner organizations on particular projects].” This is exactly what we hope can arise from bringing people together.

And finally, later this week, we are kicking off our partnership with the Perry County Health Coalition in Pennsylvania with an in-person convening of the coalition - the first time they’ll be gathering in person since 2019! So we’re trying to be thoughtful about how we make this brief time together as meaningful as possible. One thing we did is send around a survey and conduct a few interviews several weeks in advance of the meeting. We’ll be sharing our findings from the survey and interviews at the meeting as a launchpad for further discussion - this approach allows us to get the more obvious and consensus-y ideas shared quickly, leaving more of our precious in-person time to navigate the areas where there is complexity, uncertainty, or disagreement.

None of this is to say there is not unique power in virtual gathering - here at PoP Health, we love facilitating virtual convenings and have lots of tips and tools to make that time meaningful, engaging, and productive.

It’s just that this past month in particular, we’ve also been thinking a lot about the power of in-person gathering and how we can leverage that.

Reader, curious to hear your thoughts - in your experience, what’s the unique value-add of gathering in person? And how can we best leverage the power of those (sometimes rare) opportunities to be together in the same physical space? Drop me a note!

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Just do it. Then iterate.

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

Now, I know it’s not that simple (in most cases).

Maybe you can’t "just do it” because you don’t have the authority. Or because you need to assess the potential consequences. Or any one of a dozen other perfectly valid reasons.

But there are also many cases when we could "just do it" and we let something stop us. Sometimes it's perfectionism. Sometimes it's fear.

Whatever the reason, it's getting in the way of the magic of just doing it, and then iterating.

As an engineering major in college, I was trained to "fail fast". Now, I don't love thinking about it as failure per se, but it's true that the first attempt is rarely going to be a home run. So just do it. Get it out of the way. Learn as much as you can from the experience and then revise, making it better each time.

Last year, as part of a volunteer team under the umbrella of the Partnership for a Healthier Fairfax, I helped organize the very first Healthy Together Fairfax, a fun, free, interactive community event focused on healthy and active living, with hands-on activities, fitness classes, access to community services and resources, etc.

The event was set to take place at an amazing county park that has a beautiful trail walk, amphitheater, treehouse, playground, carousel, and tons of green space. My co-volunteer who is a whiz at these things put together a thoughtful, color-coded layout for how all our exhibitors would be spread out throughout the park, organized into groups based on the health topics they addressed.

Then Hurricane Ian brought a storm our way and we had to move everything indoors. We were locked out of the iPads we planned to use for exit surveys. Someone whose proposal to participate we had not accepted showed up to exhibit anyway. The list goes on.

But you know what? Despite it all, we had a WONDERFUL event - exhibitors and community members were engaged and learning from one another, we had a number of local agency heads and policymakers come read children’s story books focused on social and emotional health, we had a steady stream of fitness classes and other interactive, community health-focused activities, and everyone - organizers, exhibitors, and attendees alike - expressed excitement about doing it again next year.

But that's not all. We recently held a community meeting to plan for this year's event and we had so many people show up with so many great ideas. When we tried to do something similar last year, we had almost no one show up.

What changed? We've done it once! That means…

• We got a broader coalition on board through partners that participated in the event last year.

• People saw it in action and understood our vision, so they got more excited about it themselves and shared it with others.

• We got some systems and templates built out, meaning we could start our planning earlier and stronger this year, all while putting in fewer hours.

• We learned from last year - this year, we have a rain date set that we’re publicizing from the start, we’ve moved our timeline up so we’ll have exhibitors identified early enough to be actively included in event promotion efforts, we’ll set the exit survey ipads up differently, and so on and so forth.

So my point is - if you can, just do it. Don’t worry about getting it all right or what might go wrong - you won't get everything right, things will go wrong, AND it will still be wonderful (or at the very least, you’ll get your “first pancake” out of the way - as a firstborn child, I feel like I get a pass to share this meme). Most importantly, you’ll learn from it, and be able to do something even better in the next iteration.
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What have you been thinking about or planning for that you're feeling ready to just do? Or, if something's stopping you, what is it? Let me know!

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