About CoH – Guiding Principles
1. The individual and the environment are inseparable.
The challenges we face are the direct result of the systems we’ve created. For change to last we must simultaneously address both individual and social/contextual dimensions of health.
“We shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.” – Winston Churchill
2. Change happens through us.
More than 70% of change efforts fail, most often because they don’t engage people in what they really care about. Transformation begins on the inside, so it must be driven by what members of the community most aspire to create – and sustained by local leaders who will continue to evolve and manifest desired changes over time.
“There is no power for change greater than that of a community discovering what it cares about.” – Margaret Wheatley
3. Systemic change engages the whole system.
Stakeholders representing the many pieces of the system must come together to address all facets of a community concurrently. As we come to see these “pieces” as interdependent, we free innovative thinking and action from the structural and relational impasses we traditionally get stuck in.
“The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realize that they cannot be viewed in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.” – Fritjof Capra
4. Our best emerges in the “coming together.”
The solutions to even our most pressing problems are already within us; we simply need to shift from mechanistic approaches to more generative methods that allow collective strengths, wisdom and will to emerge. In coming together, people uncover the roots of disconnect and disease, and create “control of destiny” that is essential to health.
“We shift from paying attention to the individual or the group, to what happens between people…the emerging ability to think together that only happens in communities.” – Finn Voldtofte
5. As awareness deepens, action becomes inevitable.
When we are open to see beyond our current assumptions, we develop ideas that mean something to us and the distance between thinking and action dissolves.
“Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise what is the point of seeing?” – Buddhist proverb