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Practical Advice
Creating Health in the 21st Century
Five principles to guide how communities can develop new pathways to health, plus concrete steps toward contributing to a culture that values connections and relationships as much as treatments and health campaigns.
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Big Picture
Time to Return to the Whole
Only by finding a new narrative that embraces the whole, rather than the parts, can we build the health-creating systems we need.
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Health
Tomorrow’s Health Relies on New Relationships
Imagining a healthier future doesn’t start with how to pay for it. Communities must first develop a shared view of what a healthier life could be.
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Health
Investing in Community-led Health
The case for investing in the long-term health and well-being of communities, based on what those communities value.
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Health
How Evaluation Can Strengthen Communities
Including community members in decisions about evaluation can improve the community’s capacity to effectively manage and control change.
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Health
The Promise and Peril of Community Evaluation
Four ways to improve community evaluation so that it helps build, rather than erode, social progress.
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Health
Operating When You Can’t See the Full Picture
Three principles for solving complex, systemic problems like improving community health.
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Health
Undercover Solutions
Solutions to social problems are often hidden in the most obvious places, masquerading as problems.
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Collaboration
Cultivating and Sustaining Generative Teams
Four practices that can help people establish common intent; sense emerging needs and solutions; and collectively prototype, create, and evolve innovative health models and relationships.
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Health
Health Services and Designing for Uncertainty
How a “lean startup” approach can help create an effective community-based program.
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Health
Emerging Tools for Community-Driven Evaluations
Eight tools for building inclusive, community programs to address health and other social issues.
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Health
Connecting Big-Picture Theories with Community Experience
Blending practices and theory to improve health outcomes outside the clinical setting.
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Health
Building Trust with Communities of Color
Strategies for engaging communities of color in local health initiatives.
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Food
Between Listening and Doing
A “whole health” approach to improving access to food and food education.
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Social Issues
Giving Communities a Role to Play in Health
When people have a real voice in the decisions affecting their lives and health, they thrive in ways beyond measure.
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Health
What Is Community Anyway?
Our understanding of community can help funders and evaluators identify, understand, and strengthen the communities they work with.
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Health
The Future of Health Is Giving Communities a Voice
The role of community in well-being has always been a part of life, but the health sector’s efforts to support that role needs work.
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Health
Communities Creating Health: An Introduction
It’s time we looked beyond health care for insights on how to build community-based, health-creating systems.
Health
Communities Creating Health
People want to lead satisfying lives, and that includes feeling well. Health as defined by medicine is only part of feeling well, and yet the overwhelming majority of our society’s health investments go to the health care sector for clinical services or public health interventions. While these services are important, their dominance detracts from supporting other things that have the potential to create health.
Medicine’s narrow definition of health reinforces this dominance, which determines what we value, how we design interventions, and what we measure to determine success or failure. This is all too apparent in the requirements of funders, the experiences of implementers, and the perspectives of evaluators.
There is a large gap between what society provides to improve health and what communities want. What would happen if the design, implementation, and evaluation of health interventions became something we do with communities rather than to them? Understanding the goals that communities see for themselves, and pursuing those along with medically defined ones, has the potential to create lasting improvements in health.
Co-curated by Pritpal S. Tamber, Bridget B. Kelly, and Leigh Carroll on behalf of the Creating Health Collaborative, this series brings together the voices of community members, implementers, evaluators, and funders, and builds on a meeting hosted by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) on how evaluations in health can align more closely with what communities value. #creatinghealth
