Hi Reader,

You want to transform health in your community. And you recognize that can’t be done without communities in the center and in the lead.

But how do we actually DO that?

We’ve talked about meeting community where they literally, physically are and these strategies are great to hear what they have to say, but today, I want to push us a little further. Because there is a HUGE difference between hearing and truly listening.

Merriam-Webster defines hearing as “the process, function, or power of perceiving sound, specifically: the special sense by which noises and tones are received as stimuli”.

On the other hand, the definition of listening reads, “to pay attention to sound; to hear something with thoughtful attention: give consideration”.

There’s a lot of lip service being paid to community voice these days, as well as genuine efforts to elevate community voice. But either way, community voice isn’t enough if we merely hear it, but don’t listen to and act on it.

The “act on it” piece is vital - I’d take the definition of “listening” and argue for us to take it one step further than paying thoughtful attention and giving consideration to actually internalizing and acting on what community has to say.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Allegheny County infant health equity coalition over the last couple years, and we’ve been incredibly intentional about trying to do this. What does this look like in practice?

• The coalition is composed of moms, doulas and other birth workers, nutrition advocates, community leaders, as well as nonprofit, healthcare, and government leaders;
• We used strategies like focus groups in a box that put community members and leaders in the driver’s seat of leading discussions with community members;
• As we continue to gather community input (as we just did a couple months ago during a community kick off event for implementation of the action plan), we reflect back what we’re hearing to community in ways that are easily digestible (you can see our summary of input from the kick off here);
• We directly link the input we receive through these strategies to our action, implementation, and learning/evaluation plans and we make these connections explicit (for example, you’ll see we quoted community members directly throughout our action plan to demonstrate the connections between what we heard from community and what ended up in the action plan);
• We’ll be capturing community feedback in learning and evaluation activities that directly ask them whether they felt listened to and their input acted upon - and we’ll modify our approach to reflect what we learn.

How are you and your coalitions/organizations working to go beyond hearing from community members to actually listening to them? Drop me a line and let me know!

Until next time,

Vinu

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PPS Want to learn more about PoP Health and how we partner with community coalitions and collaboratives to transform health in communities through policy and systems change? Check out our website!

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