The Formula – Summary

Communities of Health is based on an approach that recognizes and facilitates the innate capacity within a community for forging its own destiny. It can be summarized in nine interconnected phases:

Explore: research and analysis; building community self-knowledge;
Organize: engaging the influencers – the community members with the best opportunity to mobilize core participants;
Expand: initiate and spread awareness;
Empower: emergent participation; participative planning that flows from the community;
Activate: engaged implementation; action in and by the community;
Own: claim the mission; guiding the community to a “point of no return”;
Measure: validate the mission; gauge progress toward the goal the community has defined;
Demonstrate: showcase the work; wide-ranging public description of the work;
Replicate: extending the work; allowing for variability.

While the approach practiced by Communities of Health holds great promise, it is not the final word. At its best it is the impetus for the community itself to conceive and create its own process for addressing the social factors that determine health. To address the social conditions that lie at the root of illness it must be the community itself that contemplates, designs and takes the action that leads to better lives for all its members.