Community Power and Public Health

As part of our work to grow the field of practice linking community agency and health, we’ve been looking at what it might take for public health to adopt strategies that strengthen a community’s collective ability to make purposeful choices — its ‘agency’ — as a way to improve population health.

Whether it’s called collective agency or community power, in collaboration with Collaborative Consulting, and with support from The California Endowment, we explored a number of areas, including:

• How public health currently understands the link between community power and health
• What barriers proponents of community power have faced when trying to embrace it for population health, and how those barriers were overcome
• How proponents of community power have messaged their work with different audiences
• How people in public health consume information
• And how organizations change, including the role of information

We did this by speaking with proponents of power building in California, Connecticut, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. We also reviewed the websites of 83 organizations in public health and community organizing, 32 reports of work that bridged power building and public health, and 17 reports examining how organizations change.

• Date: Tuesday December 4th, 2018
• Time: 9am Pacific; 10am Mountain; 11am Central; 12pm Eastern; 5pm GMT
• Duration: 90 minutes
• Title: Community Power & Public Health
• Cost: Free

Presenters:

• Dr Pritpal S Tamber, Bridging Health & Community
• Lori Peterson, Collaborative Consulting
• Welcome by Rachel Poulain, The California Endowment

If you work in public health or community organizing, this webinar will provide an invaluable look at how the two fields can come together, including the realities of the challenge.