Counted Out - are the keys to transforming math education the keys to transforming community health?
Are you a math person?
This Pi day, the giving circle I’m a part of hosted a screening of the documentary Counted Out, which explores how, “in the 21st century, fueled by technology, data, and algorithms, math determines who has the power to shape our world.”
Are you a math person?
This Pi day, the giving circle I’m a part of hosted a screening of the documentary Counted Out, which explores how, “in the 21st century, fueled by technology, data, and algorithms, math determines who has the power to shape our world.”
In the small group discussions following the screening, the facilitators began by asking everyone to share whether they consider themselves a math person or not, and let me tell you, it turned into something akin to a therapy session real quick. Lots of baggage out there around math.
As our facilitator pointed out, toddlers LOVE counting and categorizing everything. When does that change? When does that natural love for math get turned into fear? And what can we do about it?
To answer those questions, the film features “scenes of math transformation in action,” and I was struck by how similar these are to scenes of community health transformation in action.
Not in terms of the subject matter or who specifically is at the table, but in terms of the core lessons around how to better communicate, connect, and build capacity.
Here are some key ideas from Counted Out and the parallels I see in the work of community health coalitions:
Use their words and experiences to shape your message.
Counted Out asks viewers to consider, how do we use the language young people own so they can better access the language of math? One teacher described the importance of giving students the opportunity to express their experiences in life in their own words. Then, the teacher noted, it’s easier for them as a teacher to find a way to express a math concept in a way that uses the student’s words and helps them connect to it.
→ Here at PoP Health, we talk often about the difference between hearing and truly listening to what community members have to say. It can drive and shape our work in a myriad of ways, and the more we use their words and experiences in shaping and communicating our messages, the more our messages will resonate with them.
Make sure your examples improve understanding of real-world phenomena.
One of the interviewees in Counted Out shares a great example of a terrible math problem - one that’s intended to be a real-life application, but ends up just the opposite. “Chris drinks his milkshake at a constant rate. If he drinks one ounce per second…” a problem might begin. In the documentary, the interviewee notes that no one drinks a milkshake at a constant rate in real life! He argues that an example problem should improve students’ understanding of real life phenomena, not make it worse.
→ I think this is a great philosophy for the kinds of examples we share with community members too. If we’re oversimplifying in ways that worsen their understanding of the real life workings of the intersecting systems that impact their health, then we’re doing them a disservice. This is why I believe so deeply in orienting community towards root causes and systems.
Lighten up.
Perhaps my favorite quote from the documentary was a teenager saying “Math could just use some coffee. Lighten up.”
→ Just as the way math is taught is often too dry, so is the way we talk about community health! Bring in the humor, use silly gifs and visuals, tell a personal story, lighten up. Transport your audience.
Players, not spectators.
In Counted Out, there is talk of shifting to a mindset of students as players in the game of math education, not spectators.
→ This is the ultimate goal in community health transformation too - putting community members in the driver’s seat.
***
So, what do you think? Do these ideas ring true to you, whether with respect to math education or community health? How were you taught math? What worked and what didn’t? Drop me a line and let me know!
And to learn more about how to apply these and other lessons in the realm of community health, join me for a FREE webinar on April 2nd at noon - on action planning for community coalitions. Plus, exclusively for webinar attendees, you'll be able to book a free 30 minute assessment call with me to assess where your coalition is and what’s the right next step. If you haven't yet, be sure to register for the webinar at pophealthllc.com/webinar so you get the Zoom link.
I hope to see you there.
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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.
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!
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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?
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!)?
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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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.
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.
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Why people forget facts but remember stories - an intro to Effective Storytelling
Is your summer off to as hot and joyful a start as mine, Reader?
Our family spent the last week at an all-family violin camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, and it was a joy on so many levels (our girls did not want to come home!).
Being surrounded by music all week had me forgetting the heat (despite the lack of AC at camp) and remembering just how powerful art is and how every piece of art tells a story.
Have you heard the quote about how people forget facts but remember stories? That's definitely true but misses a key piece of the puzzle. People remember stories because they make them FEEL.
Is your summer off to as hot and joyful a start as mine, Reader?
Our family spent the last week at an all-family violin camp in the Blue Ridge mountains, and it was a joy on so many levels (our girls did not want to come home!).
Being surrounded by music all week had me forgetting the heat (despite the lack of AC at camp) and remembering just how powerful art is and how every piece of art tells a story.
Have you heard the quote about how people forget facts but remember stories? That's definitely true but misses a key piece of the puzzle. People remember stories because they make them FEEL.
Which brings me to another quote, this from Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”
I have always been moved by stories in all their forms - as an avid reader of novels, as a dancer, as a journalist through middle/high school and college, as a mom (and chief bedtime book reader).
I’ve written about the power of narrative and why we need to tell more stories before, so today I’m especially excited today to dive into the final phase of PoP Health’s CAPE process - Effective storytelling.
What do you mean by effective storytelling?
Coalitions and collaboratives working to transform health in their communities need to tell their stories - stories of their communities, their work, their process, their successes, their impact, and also their struggles and the barriers that prevent them from having more impact.
They need to tell their stories with and to community members; they need to recount their stories to policymakers and funders; they need to share their stories with partner organizations and agencies.
Effectively sharing what we know, do, and learn is essential to community health improvement. Elevating the voices of community and coalition members through these stories and synthesizing your experiences and learnings in ways that resonate with community members, policymakers, funders, and other key audiences are not easy tasks - but they are vital.
What are some ways to think about effective storytelling?
There are many storytelling frameworks to choose from, from the Hero’s Journey to the Freytag Pyramid to the Pixar Story Framework.
They all have helpful components and are worth exploring. What might be even more helpful as a starting point, though, are these two highly simplified models of storytelling:
Hook / Story / Close: This is pretty much just what it sounds like. You start with a powerful hook that captures your audience’s attention, tell a compelling story, and close with a call to action or an offer. Each component might be quite different based on your audience (what hooks a policymaker won’t hook a community member and what you want a funder to do is likely quite different than what you want a partner organization to do).
The Golden Circle: Simon Sinek’s idea of a Golden Circle, popularized via his 2009 TED Talk, captures how inspiring organizations and individuals think, act, and communicate: They start with explaining why (what’s the purpose, cause, or belief?), then how (how is the why brought to life?), and only then the what.
While we’ve been focusing on storytelling, it’s not just about the story! Who’s telling it, who’s hearing it, the channel through which they’re hearing it, how they respond, the broader context, misinformation - all of these things matter, and they can matter quite a lot. In a current project focused on strengthening cancer prevention communications, we’ve been using this communications framework to organize our findings, and I find it quite helpful:
Eight Essential Components of Communication:
Source: Who’s creating and sharing the message?
Message: What are they saying?
Channel: How is the message traveling between source and receiver?
Receiver: Who’s receiving the message from the source?
Feedback: What messages does the receiver send back to the source?
Environment: What’s the surrounding physical and psychological context where messages are being sent and received?
Context: What’s the broader setting and scene, and what supports/barriers does the receiver face in acting on the message?
Interference: What blocks or changes the source’s intended meaning of messages, including misinformation and disinformation?
What are some questions I should be asking myself about effective storytelling?
How can we elevate and center the voices of community and coalition members in our stories, and who among them will our audiences most deeply connect with?
How can we transport our audiences through story (given that narrative transportation reduces psychological barriers, serving as a powerful tool for persuasion) and tap into their self-concept/self-identity - their sense of who they are as a person (given that people engage with communications that deepen their sense of self and reject communications that counter their sense of self)?
Where and how can we best reach our audiences?
What supports or hinders our audience from acting on what we tell them, and how can we address these factors?
Sometimes, we’re so tired doing the work that we don’t take the time to tell our story - much less tell it well. But it’s a vital part of the process of transforming health in our communities.
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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’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).
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 power of a storytelling sentence
When it comes to community health improvement, we often find ourselves in situations where we need to tell a compelling story. To name just a few:
We need to convey the impact and value of a particular health issue to a policymaker so they are motivated to write or pass legislation that would help address it.
We need to share the impact a policy or program is having with our funders and communities so they are inspired to help sustain it.
When it comes to community health improvement, we often find ourselves in situations where we need to tell a compelling story. To name just a few:
We need to convey the impact and value of a particular health issue to a policymaker so they are motivated to write or pass legislation that would help address it.
We need to share the impact a policy or program is having with our funders and communities so they are inspired to help sustain it.
We need to share data from a community survey so community partners understand the top health-related needs community members are facing so that their organizations can take action to meet those needs.
PoP Health is knee-deep in each of these types of storytelling at the moment. And we’re often using data - both quantitative and qualitative - to tell these stories. We typically have a LOT of data - thankfully we work with amazing analysts who can synthesize this data into powerful, digestible visualizations.
But visualizations only tell a story if you can interpret them effectively.
One of the things I’ve come to appreciate deeply is the immense power of a storytelling sentence.
Take a data visualization and ask yourself, what do I want the person seeing this to takeaway from this?
And then write that down as simply and briefly as you can.
That’s your storytelling sentence.
Maybe it’s the title of your graph or visual, maybe it’s a summary sentence you place to the side or below.
It sounds so simple but it’s amazing how often we skip this step. This happens a lot especially with data dashboards.
You might build a high-quality, dynamic data dashboard. But will a community member or community partner seeing that dashboard know at first glance what they should be taking away from it? If you add those storytelling sentences, they will!
So this is a call to tell your story. 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!
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Too many partners, too little time, one nifty tool
Public health problems live at the intersection of many different sectors and issues.
You can’t help kids in schools do and feel better without also making sure their teachers are well, that school policies don’t kick them out of class, that their communities are safe, and so on.
So any community health improvement effort worth its salt is going to involve multiple components led by multiple partners.
Public health problems live at the intersection of many different sectors and issues.
You can’t help kids in schools do and feel better without also making sure their teachers are well, that school policies don’t kick them out of class, that their communities are safe, and so on.
So any community health improvement effort worth its salt is going to involve multiple components led by multiple partners.
But it can be really hard for those involved in a joint effort to truly understand the work of other partners. Heck, as anyone who has worked at a large corporation or agency can attest to, it's really hard to understand the work of different departments and teams within the same organization, let alone partner organizations!
Yes, we have logic models and summary descriptions and annual reports, but we often don't have the time to read those things and even when we do, they often fail to give us a true understanding of how the work looks, sounds, and feels on the ground where it's happening.
We were grappling with just this problem as part of a multi-partner effort to help kids in DC schools thrive. We were bringing various partners together for an in-person convening and many of them had expressed a desire to know more about the activities others were leading. How could we create the space for this without taking up the entire day and while keeping things engaging and interesting?
One of my colleagues on the project suggested using the Ignite Talks format - “20 slides, 15 seconds a slide, 5 minutes on stage, just you and the audience”. The emphasis in this format is on highly visual slides with interesting imagery. It’s similar to the PechaKucha format, which originated in Japan, and involves 20 slides, each for 20 seconds.
We were a little worried about asking our partners to put together a new presentation just for this convening, but decided it was worth the risk.
And it definitely was! We used these talks to open our convening and it was lively, engaging, interesting, and everyone learned a lot about the different elements of this joint effort we were engaging in.
By emphasizing visuals, we got to see what the work looked like in action.
By forcing everyone into a new presentation format, we escaped the boilerplate slides and explanations we otherwise would have gotten.
Perhaps most surprisingly, by providing a tiny bit of extra structure (“20 slides, 15 seconds each” - instead of just saying “no more than 5 minutes, please”), we actually had everyone stay within the time limit - every single person. (Who else has tried the “no more than X minutes, please” route before, only to find that no one listened to you? Turns out, a little extra structure is the answer!)
All in all, it was a wonderful experience, and one I’ll be looking for opportunities to replicate in other settings and with other groups! I think it’s a great tool for community coalitions and collaboratives to have in their pocket - if you use it, please share how it goes, and if you have questions about how we used it, please reach out.
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Hearing vs. Listening to community
You want to transform health in your community. And you recognize that can’t be done without communities in the center and in the lead.
But how do we actually DO that?
We’ve talked about meeting community where they literally, physically are and these strategies are great to hear what they have to say, but today, I want to push us a little further. Because there is a HUGE difference between hearing and truly listening.
You want to transform health in your community. And you recognize that can’t be done without communities in the center and in the lead.
But how do we actually DO that?
We’ve talked about meeting community where they literally, physically are and these strategies are great to hear what they have to say, but today, I want to push us a little further. Because there is a HUGE difference between hearing and truly listening.
Merriam-Webster defines hearing as “the process, function, or power of perceiving sound, specifically: the special sense by which noises and tones are received as stimuli”.
On the other hand, the definition of listening reads, “to pay attention to sound; to hear something with thoughtful attention: give consideration”.
There’s a lot of lip service being paid to community voice these days, as well as genuine efforts to elevate community voice. But either way, community voice isn’t enough if we merely hear it, but don’t listen to and act on it.
The “act on it” piece is vital - I’d take the definition of “listening” and argue for us to take it one step further than paying thoughtful attention and giving consideration to actually internalizing and acting on what community has to say.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Allegheny County infant health equity coalition over the last couple years, and we’ve been incredibly intentional about trying to do this. What does this look like in practice?
The coalition is composed of moms, doulas and other birth workers, nutrition advocates, community leaders, as well as nonprofit, healthcare, and government leaders;
We used strategies like focus groups in a box that put community members and leaders in the driver’s seat of leading discussions with community members;
As we continue to gather community input (as we just did a couple months ago during a community kick off event for implementation of the action plan), we reflect back what we’re hearing to community in ways that are easily digestible (you can see our summary of input from the kick off here);
We directly link the input we receive through these strategies to our action, implementation, and learning/evaluation plans and we make these connections explicit (for example, you’ll see we quoted community members directly throughout our action plan to demonstrate the connections between what we heard from community and what ended up in the action plan);
We’ll be capturing community feedback in learning and evaluation activities that directly ask them whether they felt listened to and their input acted upon - and we’ll modify our approach to reflect what we learn.
How are you and your coalitions/organizations working to go beyond hearing from community members to actually listening to them? Drop me a line and let me know!
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