What is your coalition’s UNIQUE value add?

What’s your coalition’s unique value add in your community?

Here at PoP Health, we’ve been thinking a lot about why coalitions sometimes feel stuck in neutral (and the key to shifting gears).

Our five steps to strengthen coalition foundations - the Coalition Core 5 - begins with shared clarity around why you exist as a coalition. More specifically, what is your coalition’s unique value add in your community.

What could you do to move the needle on health in your community that no other organization or group in your community is already doing or equipped to do?

Across the dozens of coalitions we’ve worked with over the years, here are the most common areas we see coalitions adding unique value:

• Addressing systems-level challenges: Individual organizations in a community are naturally (and justifiably!) focused on their specific mission and the metrics they are held accountable to (whether by themselves, by their funders, or otherwise). They are rarely in a position to take the five steps back required to examine the system as a whole and all its players and what is or isn’t working, and think holistically and objectively about what changes are needed.

• Enhancing coordination and collaboration: There are often way more resources and services and supports to address health and well-being in the community than one might expect. They’re just not coordinated in a way that maximizes impact. Sometimes this is about coordinating activities, sometimes it’s about collaborating to deliver or co-locate programs together, sometimes it’s about pooling resources, sometimes it’s about coming together around a shared narrative and messaging.

• Engaging in collective action and advocacy: The value of a coalition table is that it’s many organizations and agencies and individuals coming together around a shared cause. What can you do together that you cannot accomplish alone? What kind of collective action and advocacy could help drive important systems changes in your community? And remember that advocacy is not only about governmental policy, you can also advocate for individual companies, agencies, and other organizations to do things differently (and that includes coalition members jointly committing to making changes within their organizations).

• Building channels for community voice to drive decisions: Most of the time, the system isn’t engaging community members and it definitely isn’t responsive to them. Coalitions that prioritize bringing together community members and perspectives and then building the channels for their voice to drive decisions can have immense influence. These channels can focus on ensuring community voices drive decisions at the level of the coalition and its members but also more broadly at the level of local government, health systems, schools, businesses, and other community actors.

Here at PoP Health, we work with coalitions to help determine their unique value add and reflect it directly in their mission and theory of change.

For example, in our work with The DC Consortium for Mental Wellness and Behavioral Health in Schools (DC COMBS), we’ve helped the coalition develop a three-prong mission statement that really captures the things that no other space in the city was doing for school mental health that the coalition was uniquely poised to do:

• Strengthen collaboration across research, practice, and policy spheres.

• Create pathways for community voice to drive decisions.

• Establish relationships with the actual decision-makers at the city and school levels

This mission now filters every decision the coalition makes.

It forms the basis for the coalition’s theory of change and how members are organized, as well as the coalition’s activities, outcomes, and plans for the future. The coalition just secured two years of funding using this three-pronged mission to organize the entire proposal – it provides so much clarity and a cohesive, compelling story.

Does your coalition have this level of clarity in what it’s here to do? Are you doing things that other organizations in your community already are or easily could be doing? Or are you focused on things that only your coalition can do in your community?

Think about these questions and drop me a reply with your thoughts.

I’d love to hear about both coalitions that feel really secure in their purpose and the value they’re adding in the community (and how you got there) and coalitions that are still figuring this out (and what you’re running into as you try to do this).

***

P.S. Sometimes it helps to just say the challenges out loud. If you're looking for a fresh perspective on what’s next for your health coalition, you can find my calendar here.

And if you're looking to share this newsletter with another coalition member or colleague, here's the link to subscribe.

***

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com/newsletter.

Why most coalitions feel stuck in neutral (and the key to shifting gears)

For the last few months, we’ve been talking about how public health isn’t actually a systems business. It’s a people business.

If you missed our series on this, or are just joining us (welcome!), definitely circle back and check it out. We talked about why I think public health is a people business (despite being a HUGE believer in systems change), the one thing it all comes down to, why you need champions, the biggest threat to sustaining your coalition’s work, and why the key to your coalition’s success is to be human (yes, even in - especially in - a world obsessed with AI).

Health coalitions and other partnerships are a prime example of public health as a people business. Yes, our aim is to change systems (not people), but to get to systems change, we have to inspire, coordinate, and mobilize our coalition and community members to act, and we have to listen to and learn from them along the way.

If you’ve ever felt STUCK in neutral in your coalition - stuck in the “ sit and meet with people” phase, stuck in the “let’s do another needs assessment” phase, stuck in the “we have a strategic plan but it’s sitting on a shelf phase” - then the key to shifting gears has to do with building a foundation that recognizes this PEOPLE component of the work.

Who you have at the table, how you listen to and co-create with them, how you inspire them, how you decide what to do together, how you build their capacity - all of this matters deeply.

Without it, you lack engagement, you lose momentum, you remain stuck in neutral.

With it, you build the foundation you need to shift gears and get to meaningful action and lasting impact.

I recently gave a talk at the National Network of Public Health Institutes conference where I shared the steps involved in this foundation. We call it the Coalition Core 5 and it’s the difference between a coalition feeling stuck and feeling like a superhero, between admiring the problem and solving it, between feeling stalled and having real momentum and impact.

Here are the five steps:

Over the next several issues, we’ll unpack each of these steps, sharing how we’ve helped our partners use them to shift from neutral into high gear.

But first, I’d love to hear your initial reaction. Which of these steps sounds most promising to you in terms of unlocking greater engagement and impact in your coalition? Drop me a note and let me know!

***

P.S. Sometimes it helps to just say the challenges out loud. If you're looking for a fresh perspective on what’s next for your health coalition, you can find my calendar here.

And if you're looking to share this newsletter with another coalition member or colleague, here's the link to subscribe.

***

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com/newsletter.

In a world of bots, be a HUMAN - it’s key to your coalition’s success

As we’re highlighting through this series, public health is, at its core, a people business.

So, naturally, one key piece of advice for health coalition leaders to keep in mind: Be a human.

In an era of artificial intelligence and soulless corporations, there’s something to be said for simply being human.

And even for those of us who are devoted to transforming health and well-being in our communities, it’s easy to lose sight of the ways in which being human makes our work stronger.

So we’re going to shine a light on a few of those ways. Here’s how you can lead with your humanity:

1. Lead with YOUR story.

Don’t just embrace your humanity, lead with it. Get personal.

We love Marshall Ganz’s Public Narrative framework (ever since I first learned this from him in a grad school class, it completely reshaped the way I approach storytelling).

Instead of a dry bio, frame your communication through three lenses:

• The Story of Self: Why are you called to this work? What specific experiences shaped your values?

• The Story of Us: What shared values and experiences connect your coalition members? Your community members?

• The Story of Now: What is the urgent challenge we face, and what is the specific path forward?

2. Embrace JOY.

Yes, things are heavy in the world and in our country right now. Yes, public health has been attacked right and left. And yet - we cannot forget the human desire for JOY.

If your coalition meetings feel like a chore, people will eventually stop showing up. Find ways to infuse delight into the process - a funny icebreaker, a celebration of small wins, space for connection. If people are having fun, they’ll stay in the fight - and so will you.

3. APOLOGIZE.

We are human. We’re going to make mistakes. In a professional world that sees admitting fault as a liability, be the person who owns it.

When you make a mistake, acknowledge it. Apologize. Rewind and/or repair. When you fail to acknowledge a mistake, you lose credibility. When you own it and take action to make things better, you gain trust.

4. Prioritize COMMUNITY.

“Community is the medicine.” Every single line of this convocation speech Lily Singh gave is so on point. She says: “Everything is better when it happens alongside people you love. Though the world is trying to convince you otherwise, we are all wired for togetherness…Human connection is the entire point.”

Ok, take a look back at that list. Can AI meaningfully do these things? Can a soulless corporation?

I don't think so.

So don’t shy away from being YOU - flawed, excitable, vulnerable, real, HUMAN.

Transforming community health is a people business. The only way to succeed is to be human.

What do you think? How are you bringing your human self to your coalition meetings this week?

***

Sometimes it helps to just say the challenges out loud. If you're looking for a fresh perspective on what’s next for your health coalition, you can find my calendar here.

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com/newsletter.

The “rockstar” trap - the biggest threat to sustaining your coalition’s work

My first full time public health job was at a state health department, working with schools to implement evidence based youth violence prevention programs. Principals and school counselors were often the rockstars behind this work - until they weren’t.

I repeatedly heard counselors say: “The program was a huge success…and then our principal left.”

Then I heard principals say: “The program was a huge success…and then our school counselor left.”

Here's the thing: No matter how brilliant your program or policy is, if it relies on the passion or knowhow of a single person, it’s designed to fail.

The “Rockstar” Trap

In health coalition work, we often rely on "rockstars,” those high-energy leaders and members who carry the institutional memory in their heads and the key relationships in their personal cell phones.

But hoping these rockstars stick around forever isn’t a strategy.

People get promoted. They get sick. They move. Especially in a volunteer-heavy environment like many coalitions are, turnover isn't just possible, it’s inevitable.

If your coalition's success depends on a specific person sticking around forever, you aren't building a movement to transform health in your community, you're hosting a temporary project.

To sustain your coalition’s work and impact, we have to go from relying on rockstars to building systems for succession.

What does this look like in practice? Let’s get into it.

4 Strategies for Succession Planning

• Build a “Leadership Bench”. The first step here is to broaden buy-in and foster champions, as discussed earlier in this newsletter series - this way, the passion to keep the work going and the knowledge of how to do the work doesn't just live in one person AND you have a bench of people who are more ready to take on leadership roles when the time comes. To really build that bench though, you need to pair those broader efforts with a more focused succession planning approach. This brief (from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO)) on demystifying succession planning in public health agencies can be a helpful place to start. While not specific to coalitions, many of the concepts are still relevant! They define succession planning as “a developmental strategy that equips staff with mentorship and training to grow into a future role when it becomes available. Rather than naming a backup, succession planning fosters a transparent pipeline for growth into a vertical or lateral position change. Stretch-opportunities and cross-training drive the preparation process.”

• Kill the “Internal Rolodex”. Track and transition relationships, just as you would specific activities. Work moves at the speed of trust, and that is especially true when we’re talking about the work of community coalitions. So many relationships are needed to move the work forward - relationships with local policymakers and journalists, school system and faith-based leaders, community leaders and advocates. And if one person’s relationships live only in their internal rolodex, when they leave, those relationships vanish, and the work slows. Instead, track relationships in your project management system (which might just be a spreadsheet - that works!), along with pertinent details and notes, and when someone is leaving the coalition, make sure their relationships are transitioned too, not just their duties. Ideally, that can happen with a warm hand-off during a joint meeting (especially for really important relationships) but even in the absence of that, an email introduction or a link to where relationships are tracked in the project management system can go a long way.

• Standardize the “Brain Dump”. Establish systems that ensure institutional history and knowledge are captured - ideally in real time - so that this information doesn't disappear when a person leaves. So often, our most passionate and effective leaders and members hold so much in their heads, and without the systems to document and share it, this vital information walks out the door when they do. Establish ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ (SOP) documentation processes, have a clear file organization system in a shared drive, use a project management tool to outline and track workplans, and make sure multiple coalition members are trained to know where to find these things, understand how they are set up, and are able to update them as needed.

• Templatize the Transition: Have templates for transition documents so the person leaving has a clear roadmap of what to brain dump and document. The more of this that can happen in real time (as noted in the point above), the better, but there will always be loose ends. Make sure you have a place to capture them.

As we’re highlighting through this series, public health is a PEOPLE business.

But for our work to thrive, it cannot be dependent on the same people forever.

Whether it's the leader whose buy-in is a prerequisite for the work to move forward or the ground-level staff making it happen, plan for succession so you can sustain your work, maintain momentum, and continue to have impact in your community.

It’s the only to make sure that even when your rockstars (or you!) leave, the mission stays.

I'd love to hear from you - which of these strategies is your coalition or organization using well and where might you need to focus more?

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com/newsletter.

4 ways to center humanity in your work

Our political and business leaders may be failing to center humanity right now, but that doesn’t mean we should too - in fact, I think that means we should be even more intentional about centering humanity.

Our work is in community, where we are striving to advance health and well-being. To do this, we have to intentionally, explicitly center humanity in a world where political and technological headwinds are working against us.

How do we do this? Here are some ideas:

In your coalition meetings, take the time for an icebreaker or two, both meaningful and silly, that allow people to actually get to know each other on a deeper level. Here’s the most powerful icebreaker question I’ve come across. At a coalition meeting just yesterday, we asked folks what they’re working on right now that they’re most excited about, and it led to some wonderful conversations. And at a meeting I was at last week, they posed a series of questions and had us move to four corners of the room based on whether we agreed or disagreed (see here for more on this technique). We talked in our small groups about why we landed where we did and then shared with the other groups too, widening our perspectives (and sometimes even changing our minds).

In sharing stories and data with your community, make it specific to THEIR school, neighborhood, workplace, etc. This has come up a lot in my work in school mental health - both for those who work in schools and families of students, information is most relevant and engaging if it is specific to their school. Taking the time to parse out the data and highlight stories that are school-specific pays off in spades when those you are trying to reach actually pay attention to what you’re sharing and are motivated to take action based on it.

In the way you talk about systems and technology/AI with your community, recognize that it is the choices of humans in power, in corporations, in programming technology that create the systems and technology/AI we have. Sometimes we discuss these things as if they are born into existence on their own, rather than shaped and created by human beings.

In terms of the end goals you are working towards, know that humans need and thrive on social connections and community and in terms of how you work, know that trust and relationships are paramount.

Do these ideas resonate? Where do you feel like your coalition, organization, or even just you, as an individual, are succeeding in centering humanity, and where are you struggling? Drop me a reply and let me know!

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com!

Jane Fonda on how "community means power"

As agencies, nonprofits, families, and individuals make contingency plans upon contingency plans in face of all the uncertainty of this moment, I wanted to share some words - courtesy of Jane Fonda - of both hope and action (which were PoP Health’s wish + invitation for 2025…which, two months in, feels like it has already lasted about two years).

I’m not really up on pop culture or Hollywood, but I’ve been deeply impressed with Jane Fonda ever since I heard a podcast interview with her a couple years ago - what a life, what energy, and what commitment. In an industry where it is especially easy to ignore, pay lip service to, or throw a few pennies at societal problems, she’s been on the ground trying to fight for change.

So, I didn’t hesitate to click on the video of her speech at the SAG awards a week ago, where she received the Life Achievement Award (transcript here for the readers out there). And I’m so glad I did.

Here are my key takeaways:

• “Community means power.” - She talked about how unions have our backs and give us power, and I’d add to that all the other ways of coming together in sustained, structured ways - community coalitions, co-ops, neighborhood associations and groups. Create them, join them, sustain them.

• “Empathy is not weak or woke.” - This statement stands by itself, but Fonda had more to say about empathy. First, she connected it to the job of actors - “...we don't manufacture anything tangible. What we create is empathy.” Indeed, I’m a big believer in storytelling and its importance in creating empathy as well as inspiring and persuading. Which brings us to Fonda’s next point about empathy - “And even if they’re of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge, but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what’s coming at us.” I could not agree more. To sneak in some words from Rebecca Solnit, who I’ve been turning to often over the last couple months, “You need to pitch a big tent and welcome everyone who might come in, even if they came over recently and weren't always there. No one knows what it is going to take to overcome the current crisis…I do know that it's going to take a lot. The more the better.” As Solnit goes on to point out, “unwelcoming committees from people more interested in being right than effective” are self-destructive to the causes we support.

• “We are in our documentary moments. This is it. And it’s not a rehearsal.” - Fonda urged us to take this seriously, be brave, stay in community, and take action. And it’s not enough to just be against things. Fonda underscored, “We must find ways to project an inspiring vision of the future. One that is beckoning, welcoming, that will help people believe.”

As Fonda went on to say, “Let’s make it so,” Reader.

In your coalitions and your work, how are you projecting an inspiring vision of the future, widening your tent, staying empathetic, and building community power? Drop me a note and let me know. And let me know if you disagree about what we need right now too - disagreements are always welcome here.

And, for those looking for more concrete advice on how your coalitions, organizations, and agencies can take action in your communities to transform health - a quick save the date: April 2nd, noon ET, on Zoom, join PoP Health for a free action planning webinar. You'll learn about the #1 missing ingredient that's preventing your action plan from getting the results you want + details on how to follow our 5-step action planning process to go from feeling stuck to feeling like a superhero. Register here!

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com!

What organizing IS and ISN'T

Unfortunately, everything is still on fire, and the public’s health (and SO much else) remains under threat.

I talked earlier this month about how taking action requires a) actually planning and committing to take action and b) organizing.

But what even is organizing?

Today, I want to share a little primer on what organizing IS and what it IS NOT.

Most of the content here is from a National Academies panel with Jamila Michener and Jonathan Heller during a workshop earlier this month on democracy and governance.

Organizing IS NOT merely mobilizing.

During this panel, an attendee asked an excellent question - we’re talking about organizing to protect and advance democracy and public health, but what about all those that are organizing against those goals? Couldn’t one argue that those who don’t share these goals have basically organized us out of a democracy at this point? In their response to this question, the panelists drew a distinction between organizing (where the process of organizing has to be a democratic one and develop the critical consciousness of those involved) and mobilizing (which is just about putting people into movement, even if it’s “astroturf” or other such entities telling the community what to believe).

Organizing IS NOT merely “individuals brandishing banners stating scatter goals”.

You’ve heard me quote Grant Ennis on this before, but it bears repeating. Historical protests that led to meaningful policy change did not involve “individuals brandishing banners stating scattered goals” but rather “organized citizens focused on political action” with banners that “listed their demands and the names of the groups they represented.” We need organizational weight and structure behind demands in order to sustain the efforts to make the demands reality beyond a single protest or set of protests/actions.

Organizing IS about both building and breaking power.

The panel I mentioned was titled “Building and Breaking Power” and I think this distinction is so important. I loved how they broke down these concepts. Building power in community looks like community organizing, developing coalitions, starting social movements. Breaking power where corporate interests (or, random unelected billionaires, as the case may be) have too much of it looks like profit minimization, regulation, enforcement - and, I would add, as I heard chanted at a recent rally, it looks like litigating, legislating, agitating, and resisting. Both building and breaking power involve negotiation and storytelling and making and pursuing collective demands.

Organizing IS about a lot more than just direct action.

Don’t get me wrong, direction action is important (I’ve been dusting off my long forgotten bubble letter/coloring skills and running my daughters’ markers dry these last couple weeks making signs for rallies), but it’s just one component of organizing. During the panel I mentioned, they shared many different concepts that make up the idea of organizing (from a forthcoming publication called “Let’s Talk: Community Organizing”). I’ve organized them into three groups below.

There are aspects of organizing related to internal change in those involved:

• Increasing their sense of control/agency/power;

• Increasing their ability to reflect critically and hold complexity (which relates to the prior point about how organizing isn’t merely mobilizing);

• Building their capacity - to identify problems, to identify change targets (that solve problems, unify the base, and build power), to organize, and to collectively solve problems.

There are aspects of organizing related to external change by other actors:

• Making demands and taking actions (including via campaigns/initiatives).

And there are aspects of organizing related to structural change in how the organizing is happening (this relates to the prior point about how organizing isn’t just individuals brandishing banners):

• Building a base, “expand[ing] the number of people impacted by problems in their community who are in relationship with one another and involved in collective action”;

• Developing leadership, “shifting from private shame about the problems they face to a public stance, and [building] leadership to solve these problems”;

• Forming an organization to coalesce and sustain power (this one is incredibly important - without the structure of an organization, it's extremely difficult to keep efforts coordinated and sustained).

I continue to feel that the only way out of the many messes our country is currently in is through meaningful, effective organizing. I hope this primer is a helpful lens through which to think about it.

And I hope PoP Health's upcoming free webinar on action planning for community coalitions and launch of a new initiative that aims to change the narrative and inspire organizing to build and break power (and make organizing itself easier and more effective!) help too - we'll be sharing dates for these launches soon.

In the meantime - keep taking action! I really love this distillation of different ways (and varying levels of effort) to do something in support of democracy - https://choosedemocracy.us/what-can-i-do/.

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com!

The story matters more than the words

Howdy,

Did that "howdy" make you double take? Hi, hello, hey, yoo-hoo, yo, howdy - so many possible one-word greetings. Don't they each make you feel a little bit different?

I love words. As an avid reader, a writer, and just a human in this world, I love words.

And I do think they matter. As our little greeting exercise shows, words do evoke feelings, and they communicate all kinds of things (the mood you're in, how well you know the person you're talking to, how formal the context is, and so on and so forth).

BUT I don’t think words matter as much as policy or practice. It goes back to the old saying, actions speak louder than words.

If you’ve seen the conversation around whether to use the term unhoused or homeless or persons experiencing homelessness - I always come out of it thinking: 1) ask the people themselves (Folks have. The vast majority of them continue to prefer the term homeless.) and 2) WHO CARES if you aren’t DOING something about it?

As usual, McSweeney’s sarcasm captures it better than I can - “Our City’s New Initiative Will End Homelessness by Calling It Something Else”. Changing our words doesn’t mean we’re changing our actions - in fact, changing words often distracts from the fact that we’re not changing our actions. Much of the time, changing our words is a whole lot of virtue signaling and not much else.

When it comes to community health and well-being, changing actions - changing policy and practice - is what matters. That requires changing minds. And that, in turn, requires a compelling story.

This is where public health - and movements to advance public health - have fallen very, very short.

We should be FAR more obsessed with shaping the narrative than with word choice. As I’ve said before, we need to tell more stories (it's why PoP Health hosts a "Story Space" at the annual community health event we co-organize, sharing stories with kids about our minds, emotions, and connections to others).

But it's not just our kids who need stories. Our communities do too.

How do we tell compelling stories that place the blame on the system and not the individual? How do we tell powerful stories that make the case for prevention instead of after-the-fact treatment? How do we tell stories that build community and bring more people under our tent, instead of further alienating those we need to persuade?

THIS is what we should be obsessing about.

Words can evoke emotions, but stories are what change minds.

I find the work of organizations like Frameworks Institute and Hollywood, Health, and Society to be quite compelling on this front.

In my little corner of the world, I’ve tried to shape a story around our approach to health and am currently working on shaping a story around the impact of corporate power on our health and environment and what we can do about it.

How are you shaping stories in your work and in your communities? Or, if you aren’t yet, how might you want to moving forward? Drop me a line and let me know!

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com!

HOW to tell a powerful story + tips to transport and activate your audience

I’ve been leaning on beach reads this summer (to be honest, I lean on them year-round) and have always loved being transported to new places through stories.

But let’s be real, it’s easy to transport a reader to a beautiful beach on vacation. It’s a lot harder to transport them into, say, the lives of families in rural America.

But even stories about the same place and same community can be quite different from one another.

As J.D. Vance hits the news cycle as the Republican vice presidential nominee, I’ve been thinking a lot about an alternative to his Hillbilly Elegy (a memoir about life in rural America, which I did not read) - namely, Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (a novel about life in rural Appalachia, which I read and found deeply moving).

Hillbilly Elegy (although it received critical acclaim from many upon release) has been described as condescending and inauthentic. I suspect the reason for this is the nature of the stories the book tells. As one Appalachian Studies expert put it, “One of the most troubling things to me about the book is that it talks a lot about unemployment and poverty, domestic violence, the opioid crisis, but it never gives you context for why those things exist the way they do in Appalachia.”

In contrast, one journalist notes, “Kingsolver slyly weaves the history of her home into Demon’s harrowing tale. From the Whiskey Rebellion to the boom and bust of the tobacco and coal industries, she describes a community preyed on for decades as governments and companies extracted their resources. And then came the opioid crisis.”

If you haven’t read Demon Copperhead yet, pick it up now - it’ll show you the power of story in transporting us much better than I can. But you know me, I’m going to try anyway! Here are some tips, strategies, and resources for transporting and activating your audience via powerful storytelling.

Can you share some tips for effective storytelling?

Storyboard. I have loved Echo Rivera’s trainings around presentations (which are, after all, simply a story you’re telling!) and one thing she emphasizes is that Step 1 is storyboarding. You have to map out the flow of the story you’re telling from the get-go and make sure it’s going to leave the audience with the right takeaways. So don’t jump to writing, slide creation, or anything else until you’ve taken the time to storyboard.

Get personal. Here at PoP Health, we’ve been working on a project for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention focused on how to improve public health cancer prevention messaging and one of our key takeaways has been the need to get more personal. What does this look like? It’s not about dry facts or abstract concepts. Instead, think personal true stories from “people like me” that are accompanied by the faces of those people, embedding health information in TV shows, appealing to one’s identity (tapping into a shared identity of being a mom, encouraging kids to “be a helper” instead of “help others”).

Be relatable. Use words your audience would use. Use metaphors to help boil down complex concepts into something your audience can wrap their arms around. Keep it local.

Get visual. Drawings, photos, videos, GIFs, all can be helpful, especially when they feature real people, make your audience laugh, or convey a powerful message. Infographics and data visualization - when done well - are also great tools.

What are some specific strategies for effective storytelling?

Co-create stories and messages: You know who already knows the real stories that will resonate with your audience? The people who’ve lived those stories. Also known as your audience. Co-create stories and messages with them.

Interpret your data for your audience: Use a storytelling sentence. Don’t leave it to chance or someone else’s interpretation. Don't assume the numbers speak for themselves. It's your story - so, tell it! Along the same lines, take this great advice from Stephanie Evergreen and make your data dashboard a webpage. Why? Because then, you’ll be telling an actual story! And as Stephanie says, “That narrative is where you get nuance. Expansion. Explanation. Clarification.”

Tailor content: First, you need to tailor content to your audience (based on a wide range of factors that are too much to get into here - more to come on that in the future), to the channel you’re using (please don’t post your static flier content to Tik Tok or vice versa!), and to the current and local contexts. Also tailor content to the type of deliverable (Website? Report? Social media post? Podcast?) and tailor the deliverable you’re choosing to work for your particular goals and audience. Even within a single deliverable, try to make it modular, so you can easily toggle in and out “modules” for different audiences based on who needs X background information or who cares about Y data.

What are some resources to help me tell powerful stories?

Echo Rivera’s free 6 Gears of Creating Engaging Presentations training

Stephanie Evergreen’s “delightful, strategy shifting, and totally free ideas for your next data viz”

Potential Energy Coalition’s Talk Like a Human guide (I think their lessons on how to communicate climate change apply much, much more broadly!)

Here’s the thing, effectively sharing what we know, do, and learn is essential to transforming health in our communities. And there is no better way to do that than to tell stories. So embrace your identity as a storyteller and get REALLY good at it - the results will surprise you.

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com!

A Participatory Evaluation HOW TO: tips and tools for sensemaking, storytelling, and more

It was college reunion weekend at my alma mater (wahoowa!), and in addition to taking a few (literal) walks down memory lane, I thought a lot about feeling a sense of community and what magic combination of ingredients is needed to create that.

Shared experiences - especially those where you gain something of value and even more so those where you create something of value - are part of that secret sauce.

And participatory evaluation, when done well, checks all those boxes.

If you missed the last issue of Community Threads, be sure to check it out first, as it provides an overview of PoP Health’s participatory evaluation approach. With that approach in mind, today’s issue is diving into HOW we actually do participatory evaluation. Let's jump right in.

Can you share some tips for participatory evaluation?

Begin with the end goal in mind, and design your evaluation and learning process accordingly. What do community members, coalition members, and the evaluation and learning team most want to learn and why?

Consider how community members can co-own - and meaningfully benefit - from every stage of the evaluation and learning process, from initial brainstorming and planning through data collection and analysis through sensemaking and storytelling. How is each stage of the process structured to allow community members to drive or co-lead the process? How is each stage of the process designed to ensure community members walk away with new capacity, connections, resources, and supports?

Develop infrastructure for responsive feedback and continuous quality improvement. You’ve heard this tip before from me and I'm repeating it here because it can't be overstated and hardly anyone truly does it! Yes, a key goal of evaluation is to understand impact but an equally if not more important goal is to improve the work. It's vital to set up infrastructure (time, resources, systems) from the outset so you are flexible and nimble enough to implement course corrections and improvements in real time based on analysis of monitoring data.

Diversify and tailor your evaluation deliverables, and make them modular where possible. Here is a slide from PoP Health’s Evaluation 101 workshop that includes a range of possible deliverables through which to share evaluation results and stories (and there are many more beyond what's listed here).

Don’t limit yourself here, get creative! Data dashboards are all the rage these days, but I love Stephanie Evergreen’s take on them, especially for something community facing - make it a webpage instead. You can also tailor content to different audiences - we often do this via briefs/two-pagers, one for community members, one for policymakers, one for funders, and so on. They each care about different things. We have also had success with making our briefs modular - having “modules” (short sections of the brief) that can be toggled in or out of a brief depending on who needs X background information or who cares about Y data.

What are some specific strategies for participatory evaluation?

There are many, but here are a few I especially appreciate for the meaningful role community and coalition members play:

Community based system dynamics modeling: A key part of evaluation and learning in public health is understanding dynamic, complex, messy systems. In the case of our work on school mental health in DC, students, family members, teachers, school administrators, policymakers, and others may have completely different understandings of the school mental health system. So we engaged in what’s called Community Based System Dynamics, in partnership with the Social System Dynamics Lab – this process uses participatory group model building approaches to explore the system in question. We held modeling workshops with students, with caregivers, with teachers, and with our multisector Stakeholder Learning Community. During the workshops, groups huddled around large sheets of paper, discussing, writing things down, crossing things out, drawing arrows, and so on. They produced a series of causal loop diagrams, which I then synthesized and integrated into this version of our systems map. Much more on this in a prior PoP Health newsletter here.

Data placemats for collective sensemaking: Community members and coalition members have experiences, expertise, and perspectives that lead them to insights your evaluation team, program team, and funders are apt to miss entirely. So don't make the mistake of leaving them out of the conversation. I love using highly visual data placemats and data posters to bring coalition members and community members into the process of making sense of data and drawing insights - about what we've learned so far, how to continually improve the initiatives we work on, and what other information we need to gather moving forward. We’ve recently used data placemats (during a coalition-wide data sensemaking session) and data posters (during a community-wide symposium) to share initial data from evaluation of the BIRTH Plan with our community and coalition partners in Pittsburgh, pairing the visuals with discussion questions that help elicit their thoughts on what they take away from the data, their insights about how to improve the work, and what additional information they’d most like to see in the future.

Sharing personal narratives: Nothing is quite as powerful as a story in someone’s own voice. Capturing personal narratives of community members/program participants/those influenced by a policy is a vital participatory evaluation strategy. In addition to focus groups and interviews, there are many creative ways to do this, including video journals, audio diaries, photo voice, and more. I especially love this idea of a participatory video process focused on stories of significant change. Participants are given the chance to take part in a Participatory Video process at baseline; stories of Most Significant Change are collected via structured story circles at midline; each circle selects one story to record on video. A participatory analysis identifies themes and recommendations. Given consent, videos can be shared so stakeholders learn directly from participants’ stories.

Community collaboration strategies: The community collaboration strategies we have featured previously (i.e., focus groups in a box, data walks, and street stalls) can also all be used in the context of evaluation and learning.

What are some resources to help me engage in participatory evaluation?

I’d like to leave you with a few resources I’ve found especially practical and useful in terms of participatory evaluation. As always, drop me a note to share other helpful resources or tools you’ve come across!

• ​Participatory Evaluation: Theories + Methods for Remote Work(a guide I refer to regularly for meeting facilitation ideas, whether virtual or in-person!) from Evaluation + Learning Consulting

• ​Community-Driven Data and Evaluation Strategies to Transform Power and Place (hot off the presses from Build Healthy Places)

• ​Participatory Evaluation Toolkit from Health Nexus (which provides a great overview of 7+ specific techniques)

As always, we share these tips, strategies, and resources in the hopes that they help you understand HOW to engage in participatory evaluation.

Participatory evaluation is likely going to be messier, slower, and more expensive than more traditional evaluation approaches. But on the flip side… You’ll be driven by community. You’ll learn more. You’ll create greater and more sustained change in your community.

The pros definitely outweigh the cons in my book - what about for you?

Sign up to receive future newsletters directly in your inbox at www.pophealthllc.com!