Organizing Communities to Create Health

Vast and ever-increasing sums of money are spent each year on health care, but not on what most people would like to see change to make their lives "healthier." The health care industry is locked into a model focused on our most passive states—viewing health as curing our diseases and preventing us from causing ourselves harm. To support us in actively creating health for ourselves and for our families, friends, and neighbors, the health industry needs to broaden its view and share its decision-making power with the people it serves.

This webinar is for community leaders and organizers who wish to connect to the health and public health sectors, and the resources they have to offer. It is also for health care, public health, and social change leaders interested in how to better understand the complex needs of the communities they serve and what role health has among other aims.

Presented by the Creating Health Collaborative, this webinar will:

• Provide an overview of the role that communities can play in creating their own health, as they themselves define it
• Review guiding principles for how to foster that role
• Offer advice on how health care and sectors skilled at community building through shared decision-making can better understand how their priorities, and those of communities, relate to each other and how they can work hand-in-hand
• Offer resources and tools to help develop agreement on priorities among diverse perspectives
• Share examples from panelists with community outreach, research, and clinical experience

What people value as part of a satisfying life is more than the absence of disease; it also encompasses physical functioning, emotional and financial security, safety, nourishing relationships, and a sense of meaning. These relate to familiar aims of community building—economic development, housing, combating social isolation, and education. Yet they can also contribute to specific health outcomes that have traditionally been of the greatest interest to the health field, such as controlling heart disease and diabetes, preventing substance abuse, and reducing emergency room visits and hospital readmissions. Community members themselves understand a lot about the changes they desire to make their lives better, and there is potential to create lasting improvements in health if we view and support community members as active, knowledgeable agents. To do so will require more-inclusive approaches to prioritizing what matters, choosing the most feasible and useful projects, allocating resources, and generating new knowledge.

Presented in conjunction with the Creating Health Collaborative, an international collective aiming to understand health beyond the lens of health care, this webinar builds on the recent SSIR series, Communities Creating Health, which is now available as an eBook. The webinar will feature an overview presentation from Bridget B. Kelly, a member of the Creating Health Collaborative and co-editor of the SSIR series. She will be joined by Regina Stevens, a health educator at Birth Matters; Nayeli Y. Chavez-Dueñas, a researcher on the faculty of the Chicago School of Professional Psychology; and Mark L. Wieland, a primary care physician at the Mayo Clinic and also a member of the Creating Health Collaborative.