August EDI Corner - Community Engagement in Dental Public Health
Community engagement is a health equity strategy for program planning and research that seeks to address imbalances of power through a process of relationship building and negotiation that centers communities’ perspectives on how to address their needs through evidence-based practices. In its purest form it is intentional, true partnership: a give and take of ideas and resources to achieve the greater good, and demands a successful alignment of personal relationships, the work itself, and expected short and long-term outcomes.
The First Step: Building Personal Relationships
Practical Tips:
- Physically go into the communities that you wish to partner with.
- Show support for the overall mission of the organizations that you wish to partner with.
- Negotiate the best times and modalities for ongoing communication, i.e., in-person meetings, text messages, evenings/ weekends, etc.
The Work Itself: Establishing a Foundation for Ongoing Collaboration
This process consists of active listening with respect for each other’s knowledge, ideas, priorities, and general approaches to getting things done. It involves setting parameters around resource distribution, organizational capacities, timelines, and limitations. At this stage, there should also be an alignment of ethical values such as integrity and accountability. In addition, there should be clear communication of project goals and the steps that should be taken to achieve those goals. Missteps within this domain may consist of parties over-promising on outcomes and/or having unrealistic expectations of each other. The result may create an unpleasant work atmosphere, which even if the initial project is successful, may threaten opportunities to sustain and advance the work.
Practical Tips:
- Be honest and transparent about all aspects of the project. This includes personnel, budget, study protocols, scholarship credit, and timelines.
- Be willing to shift and/or defer to what’s best and most feasible for the community in achieving program objectives.
- Collaborate on manuscripts, conferences, presentations, research posters, and other materials developed to promote the work.
Short and Long-Term Outcomes
This stage is necessary for parties to begin thinking about how to move partnerships forward. It should be communicated early if projects are one-and-done initiatives or if there’s an interest in building toward something larger in the future, and what that may entail. Initiating an ongoing strategic planning process may be helpful to make sure that expectations are assessed, agreed upon, updated, and communicated clearly. Failure to address this stage may contribute to dysfunction in ongoing project initiatives as personal and institutional goals, resources, capacities, interests, and priorities will likely change over time.
Community engagement should be something that funders and institutions are also actively engaged in, to the extent possible, in addition to researchers and program developers. This helps to assure that what gets funded, how funding is promoted, and how funding is allocated, is directly targeting the needs and capacities of communities most in need. In addition, funded entities would be held accountable to cultivate already established partnerships with communities where the need for intervention has already been identified.
The process of community engagement takes a considerable amount of time, commitment, and intentionality, but also involves a combination of tangible and intangible skills. Those tangible skills may include grant writing, data analysis, program evaluation, financial management, and public speaking. The intangible, and arguably, more important skills, may include knowing how to respect and show respect toward people and their culture, willful listening, culturally aligned communication, being available for people, and showing up with humility and empathy. If equity is truly the goal, then prioritizing the latter is arguably the most imperative.
Resources:
- Building Community Partnerships to Sustain Health Equity Programs
- Building Community Relationships
- It’s All About Relationships: Driving Health Equity by Prioritizing Connections
|
