Community Engagement and Mobilization
Encouraging community ownership of key priorities
and health equity progress
Overview
“Health equity” means different things to different communities or underserved groups. The kinds of steps and priority actions, which may lead to progress toward achieving health, are usually understood differently by different communities and groups. Many community members may actually find it difficult to define, in their own words, both what health equity is and what are some of the key priority steps to achieve it. This is further complicated by the fact that key priorities are likely to differ in different groups and populations depending on local needs and infrastructure. Two of the core objectives of the Initiative are to (1) help individual communities define health equity and related goals; and (2) help break down health equity into doable steps by engaging citizens and communities; helping them prioritize actions and behaviors; establishing progress indicators that are developed by community members and recognized at the community level; and encouraging citizen and community participation in the overall behavioral and social change. At HEI, we believe in the importance of using an integrated communication approach to community engagement and social mobilization. Therefore, in addition to our Health Equity Exchange forum on our website and other media, we seek to actively engage different segments of society via interpersonal communication, community dialogue and mobilization, and other offline participatory processes that will help give voice to vulnerable and underserved populations in defining their own road map to health equity. We envision that such integrated approach would lead to shared meanings of health-related concepts and, most importantly, to behavioral results at different levels of society, in support of improved public health outcomes among vulnerable populations. After all, while we are excited about new media and their potential to create community around an issue, we want to make sure that online communities always translate into offline action, and that community, social, and policy behaviors can be sustained over time. This requires more than one communication approach, so that we can mirror the way people take health-related decisions (by speaking with friends and relatives, talking with their healthcare providers, reading the news, accessing the internet, participating in community events, complying with policies and regulations, etc.). HEI does not want to leave any stone unturned in creating the social movement we want to facilitate!
Follow Us!