Program Overview
There are seven principal sections to HumanaNatura’s Community Health Program.
These program components integrate essential theoretical and practical considerations to create a comprehensive, progressive, and open-ended approach to natural public health promotion:
- Imperative of Community Health
- The HumanaNatura System
- Understanding Public and Community Health
- Assessing Community Health
- Prioritization and Consensus-Building
- Implementing Change in Communities
- Learning and Building Progressive Health
Together, the seven topics guide the HumanaNatura technique of Natural Communities and provide a formal process for community health leadership: To aid your overall understanding of the program, the seven sections are briefly summarized below.
Section 1: Imperative of community health
Our Community Health Program begins with the case for community health. This includes discussion of the inherently social nature of human life and resulting inevitably of interdependence in all achieved states of human health. Our initial discussion underscores well-established science showing the strong influence that our community context and social systems have on our personal orientation, health, and quality of life.
The section introduces the program’s general proposal that participatory and open-ended public health efforts should become the central focus and principal mission of the world’s modern communities. This proposal aims to immediately improve community health promotion and available states of individual health, while creating a self-sustaining and progressive paradigm for pursuing our collective health and quality of life potential over time and for the future.
This general program proposal is rooted in HumanaNatura’s larger advocacy of a modern global shift to progressive health-based life. Our advocacy of this essential change in modern society is grounded in new science suggesting that the potential for revolutionary new individual and societal health and quality of life is contained in contemporary technological and scientific advances. These advances not only provide modern people with new human capacities for social organization and natural adaptiveness, they also call on us to reconsider limiting historical conceptions of the optimal aims of society and our human requirements for health and well-being.
Our encouragement of individual cooperation for health in communities is intended to provide two important practical benefits. One benefit is encouraging better aimed and more beneficial social investments in our communities, thereby creating conditions for new advances in our long-term collective health.
At the same time, work at promoting community health allows individuals to immediately fulfill key dimensions of our natural health – outlined in the Natural Living section of our Personal Health Program – that involve external focus, cooperation and reciprocity with others, and community transparency and equality.
Section 2: The HumanaNatura system
HumanaNatura’s Community Health Program includes a brief overview of our science-based system for natural health enhancement and summarizes some of our essential ideas about modern natural life. This discussion will be helpful for people unfamiliar with HumanaNatura and the key features of our widely-used Personal Health Program.
This overview includes an introduction to HumanaNatura’s integrated system of four natural health techniques: 1) Natural Eating, 2) Natural Exercise, 3) Natural Living, and 4) Natural Communities. Importantly, the section also includes a synopsis of the seven-step process of individual health enhancement that underlies the critical health technique of Natural Living. As suggested in the Introduction, this process for individual quality of life enhancement closely parallels the approach we use for community health promotion.
Our review of HumanaNatura’s science-based system for progressive natural health ensures an adequate grounding in our simple but for some quite revolutionary ideas about natural health promotion. If you are not acquainted with HumanaNatura, the review may provide you with new perspectives and immediate insights into your personal opportunities to better explore your natural health and well-being.
Section 3: Understanding public and community health
The next section of our Community Health Program provides an extended introduction to the discipline of public health – a contemporary field of applied science that seeks to improve general human health conditions and quality of life. This section notably includes important HumanaNatura proposals for changes in the way the modern discipline of public health is envisioned and conducted, both today and for the future.
In our review of existing public and community health promotion practices, we review the past and current practices and focus areas of our international public health system. This system includes local, regional, national, and global organizations tasked with large-scale application of advancing health science in our communities and overall society. In this review, we underscore the ways in which our public health system has become a critical function of modern government, leading well-established and often quite impactful health promotion programs in all developed and almost all developing nations today.
As we discuss, our public health system today is now an enormous effort that has had a series of startling successes in advancing human health in the last century (in the developed world especially), but more recently has begun to slow in its ability to envision and catalyze further advances in health conditions. Given this important trend, we consider and propose why the speed and force of public health progress may be leveling or slowing right now – instead of progressively increasing as might be hoped – both in absolute terms and particularly when compared to the still rapidly accelerating pace of applicable health and well-being science.
One factor limiting new public health advances that we highlight is the fact that past public efforts are often significantly underappreciated by people today and are not reflected in our dominant patterns of health-related expenditures in much of the world. To support this idea, we point out that of the roughly 30-year improvement in life expectancy in the developed world from 1900 to 2000, approximately 25 of these added years of life came from public health efforts, while only five resulted from improved medical care.
These empirical findings, however, today have had little impact on our growing pattern of suboptimal health-related social investment patterns, which favor medical care expenditures over public health promotion by a factor of roughly 30:1. This critical and far from ideal condition, as well as other signs of slowing public health progress, calls to task our current public health system – including its advocacy methods and basic operating model – and begins a case for systemic change in our approach to public health promotion today.
In our discussion of past, current, and potential public health practices, we highlight four specific opportunities for our public health system to re-ground and strengthen its health promotion efforts in a new century:
Proposed Changes to our Public Health System
- Broader use of science
- New emphasis on public leadership
- Community-based health promotion
- Commitment to progressivity
The aim of these HumanaNatura proposals is the creation of a far more activist, participatory, and community-based public health system. Our proposals respond to current limitations in our public health system and aim at a larger, more holistic, and progressive exploration of our human health potential. Our proposals seek to help our public health institutions to again keep pace with and lead in the application of available health science, to match this scientific mastery with needed new political prowess, and to recast public health efforts as an essential aspect of a new preeminent goal for post-industrial society – the open-ended advancement of human well-being, quality of life, and sustainability.
Sections 4-7: Assessing and improving community health
After an extended discussion of the current state and new progressive potential of our public health system, HumanaNatura’s Community Health Program moves to practical considerations in promoting improved health and quality of life in local and regional communities around the world.
This comprehensive and practitioner-oriented discussion of community health advancement encompasses the four remaining sections of the HumanaNatura Community Health Program: 1) Assessing community health, 2) Prioritization and consensus-building, 3) Implementing change in communities, and 4) Learning and building progressive health. Together, these four sections provide a formal process for promoting Natural Communities and show in pragmatic terms how the HumanaNatura ethos of cooperation for health can be realized in the management of local and regional government.
In these four sections of the HumanaNatura Community Health Program, we offer step-by-step guidance in the work of applied science that is progressive community health promotion. We explain in detail our comprehensive process for leading impactful, open-ended, and self-catalyzing community health promotion efforts. This systematic process uses HumanaNatura’s five-step community health promotion model, which forms the essential method and practical focus of our Community Health Program:
HumanaNatura’s Five Steps of Community Health Promotion
- Assess and verify community health conditions
- Identify and prioritize potential health actions
- Validate potential actions and build community consensus
- Design, implement, and monitor community health actions
- Assess actions for learning and to increase community support
As suggested in the Introduction, these integrated techniques form a repeating, self-progressing, and open-ended process for community health promotion. They weave together critical findings of health science, public health and public policy methods, and community and organizational leadership practices into a powerful new approach to community health advocacy. This approach includes situational analysis, consensus-building, targeted action, and ongoing learning – aimed at ensuring tangible and compounding cycles of community health promotion.
Within this discussion of HumanaNatura’s approach to community health promotion, we include detailed instructions for using our Community Assessment Form, a data-driven spreadsheet tool that guides the work of assessing community health conditions and exploring options for change. Our Community Assessment Form contains over 100 objective community health benchmarks and allows for the quantitative scoring of a community’s health status against these key community health factors
Importantly, because of its use of factor scoring, our Community Assessment Form permits not just detailed analysis of a community’s health status, but comparison of its status with other communities and reliable measurement of its health and quality of life progress over time.
New health awareness and action
In the HumanaNatura natural health system, all work at health promotion proceeds from new awareness of current health levels and focuses action on the most compelling opportunities for health and quality of life progress at any point in time. This is true whether action is in an individual’s life, in the life of an entire community, or in our global society.
HumanaNatura encourages the broadest possible use of available health science, as well as greater recognition that the use of science in health advancement is a creative or adaptive process. As applied science, health promotion in our lives and communities inevitably begins from a variety of initial states and conditions, can reach forward in many potential paths or expressions of positive change, and ultimately operates without appreciable limits.
In this way, our practical, non-ideological, and open-ended approach to health advancement seeks to mimic nature’s own essential dynamics. This new and more natural approach to health promotion informs all of HumanaNatura’s health programs and tools, and exists in sharp contrast to individual and public health programs aimed at (and thus often limited by) specific health outcomes or sets of functional objectives.
When you have completed your review of our Community Health Program, you will have a robust and critical grounding in the current state of contemporary public health efforts, a comprehensive process for assessing and prioritizing potential community health actions, and the essential tools you will need to progressively and cooperatively advance health and quality of life agendas in local and regional communities.
At the same time, you will have equally gained a new ability to fulfill key social dimensions of your natural health, as you consider new personal action within the powerful HumanaNatura natural health technique we call Natural Communities.