"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?
HOW to put community voices in the driver’s seat
Are you ever told to do something and find yourself wondering, “Yes, but HOW?”
With PoP Health’s 2024 newsletter series, we want to be sure to at least begin to answer that question. For each phase of our C.A.P.E. process that we introduce, we’ll have an initial post orienting us to the topic and a second post that answers the “Yes, but HOW?” question.
Putting community voices in the driver’s seat
In this post, we’ll dive into the first phase of our C.A.P.E. process: Community Collaboration.
This month, we’re going to focus specifically on collaboration with community members - today, we’ll get oriented to what we mean by that and in a couple weeks, we’ll walk through some specific strategies in this arena.
Without further ado, let’s get into it - FAQ style.
A non-cringey survey that helps coalitions understand themselves
Today, I’m going to talk about surveys.
Does that make you cringe?
I understand if it does. Surveys get a bad rap.
We’re often trying to get participants in a program or members of a community to take a survey, and - often - we don’t provide enough context for them to buy into the value of the information they’re sharing or for them to believe any changes will result from their input. To be fair, and to make matters worse, oftentimes there aren’t changes made as a result of survey responses.
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.
How to keep people engaged in community health improvement efforts
Have you ever struggled to keep people engaged in a community health improvement effort (or any effort, for that matter)?
I work with a lot of community coalitions and collaboratives, and most of them are volunteer-based, which makes this question of how to maintain engagement especially important. But even those that compensate their members for their involvement need to consider the question of how to keep people involved and inspired and motivated to participate and act in meaningful ways.
The shifts that come from listening
I've talked about the difference between hearing and listening to community before.
And even though it's something I believe in deeply, I'm still surprised at the shifts that happen when we truly do that.
A couple weeks ago, for work I'm doing in DC around systems-level shifts to school mental health, we brought together youth to generate ideas around how to improve youth engagement in the school context.
Here are some of the ideas that came up repeatedly:
A fish, an elephant, and an iceberg: Orienting community towards root causes and systems
When a community is trying to address a public health problem, the immediate causes are often the most apparent.
Too many youth aren't physically active. Why? They don't understand the value of physical activity or the consequences of not being active. What should we do? An education and mass communication campaign to help them understand this value and these consequences, so that they are motivated to be more active.
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.
How to meet community where they (literally) are
One of my favorite parts of my work with community coalitions and collaboratives is working with them to meet the community where they are.
As a recovering academic, let me tell you why communities don’t trust academics and researchers - even when academics are trying to get community input, the typical model is that they bring folks together in a new space where the researcher has all the power and then ask community members to answer a bunch of questions to serve their own research needs and then the community never hears from them again.
Harsh, right?