Learning & Building Progressive Health
The work of promoting change toward new states of community health and quality of life seeks to create both specific new health enablers and an eventual shift to self-advancing, compounding, and transformative new levels of vitality and quality of life for the members of a community. This larger goal and potential can become overlooked in the work of advancing individual health campaigns, or obscured in the present life and seemingly intractable health conditions of any community.
The process of achieving progressive and self-advancing health involves a succession of targeted and often synergistic health investments in the community, building and encouraging broad community involvement in them and then a growing commitment to ongoing improvement in its health conditions. Investments of this sort will sometimes be controversial and will have detractors, especially before and sometimes even well after community benefits are realized. As mentioned before, persistent resistance to change, especially in the face of clear prospective or realized community benefits, can be based on emotion or self-interest.
At times, however, objections to a particular health campaign will be rooted in issues of fact or perception, which of course must be addressed patiently and rigorously – in an evidenced-based approach to change and by the clear application and explanation of relevant health science. Other objections simply may be based on fear of change and will require a response of a different sort, especially when the factual case for change is clear and strong. By this, we mean addressing non-factual objections openly and compassionately, probing for and clarifying underlying assumptions, and building new trust (and even hope) in the community.
At first, your Health Action Group is likely to be a strange new artifact in your community. If it remains true to its mission, your group will both ask and help the community to act pragmatically on its most urgent and compelling health and quality of life issues. It will help the community to see and work on its most important and actionable health limiters and health enablers, and to explore and evolve its health landscape. Your group will help your community understand the important influences that community health has on individual health and well-being, and its many opportunities for positive change.
This perhaps entirely new effort begins a process that leads to making the advancement of health and quality of life the basic mission of the community. In this work, your group will explore and encourage new and ongoing envisioning of what greater health and quality of life might mean, and how each can be practically advanced and achieved. In this way, long-term support and involvement is naturally fostered, and the novelty of community health advocacy efforts are made not just more familiar, but integral to community life itself.
Critical elements of community health advancement include patient analysis and targeting of community health issues and opportunities, a transparent process and commitment to respectful consensus-building, promoting community involvement and ownership of its health, thoughtful and at times creative advocacy and leadership, and ongoing learning and reassessment, including periodic examination and renewal of these community health promotion steps.
With successful implementation of early health-promoting actions, the process of community health promotion gradually engenders a shared and advancing new sense of what is possible and desirable for the community. It informs and encourages others to see more clearly the community as it is and to imagine what it might one day become – through the process of regularly charting new courses of action that lead the community from the actual to its growing sense of the possible over time. Often, this new outlook affects not just community conditions, but can increasingly permeate perspectives on individual life as well.
Inevitably, as campaign successes are achieved and new health-promoting conditions are achieved and woven into the pattern of daily community life, new learning and perspectives will occur among community members. Through this personal learning – often integral to or dependent upon alteration of a community’s health landscape – the scope of your community’s health focus can broaden. Your Health Action Group may soon find itself much freer to consider more significant health issues and more ambitious health actions. In time, this trend may gradually grow to encompass many or all of the health factors included in HumanaNatura’s Community Assessment Form, and other community health factors that you discover in your work.
In the pragmatic spirit of our Community Health Program, we will advise you upfront to expect setbacks and unforeseen developments in the long process of exploring and pursuing a community’s open-ended health opportunity. As we have suggested, each setback or unexpected development should be viewed as an opportunity for essential learning and synthesis, and for new health awareness by your community in general and for the Health Action Group in particular.
In the case of significant setbacks, a candid evaluation always must be conducted to understand if any preventable shortfalls have occurred, so that the community, your action group and your capacity for health promotion are all strengthened and better informed for the future. This can include issues related to process and organization, technical analysis, political considerations, campaign execution and oversight, or quality assurance and the essential monitoring of the implementation of change.
In the past, traditional public health organizations have achieved great advances in health and quality of life in many foundational areas of community health, and demonstrate the power of thoughtfully applied health science and well-targeted social investments. If we have been critical of existing public health institutions and practices, it is not with regard to their purpose and ultimate goal, but with their often too narrow focus, inadequate political and advocacy methods, and insufficiently progressive sense of endeavor today.
When your Health Action Group and community achieve initial health promotion successes, each will be time for celebrating and enjoying the satisfaction of hard-won effort, and also an opportunity for reflection and learning – each in the knowledge that your group has made a difference in the life of your community and likely has begun to influence other communities too.
Eventually, as one or more campaigns are successfully concluded, it will become time for a repeating all or part of the process we have described, so that you may better sense your communities evolving health possibilities, and evolve your Community Vision and Community Health Agenda. With successful health advocacy, a community’s health landscape inevitably is changed, and often in unexpected and unintended ways. Your Health Action Group will need to be prepared for and attuned to such impacts, and the new heath actions it makes possible. As mentioned before, HumanaNatura recommends repeating the assessment and prioritization processes yearly (or after significant change in the community).
Because of the constancy and complexity of change, receptivity to new views and ideas will always be a critical part of your Health Action Group and the process of progressive community health promotion, just as it is in our individual lives when we seek progressive health and quality of life for ourselves. Sometimes, soliciting new views will require planned effort, but other times, new perspectives and ideas will come on their own (and perhaps as opportunities and with new resources to promote change).
However your community’s path toward increasing health is shaped, and shapes itself, the impact of sustained and all progressive efforts at community health advocacy will be the same: new insights and learning, new connections and ideas, at times hard-won but always satisfying progress, and new visions and agendas for advancing community health toward its naturally open-ended potential.
One day, you may realize that your group’s Community Health Agenda has naturally become fused with and assimilated into your community’s natural rhythm – its preoccupations, political landscape, and overall concerns of life.
When this happens, your community’s health agenda doesn’t end, it accelerates beyond expectation.