Community Engagement Framework
Community members to understand our grounding in community-engaged work and how we listen, learn, and take action with the community’s we serve.
DFMCH faculty, residents, staff, and administrators involved in community engagement at our clinics and programs to align on how we do community engagement work.
Mission & Vision
Mission
Equip the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health with the infrastructure that supports faculty, staff, learners, clinics and programs to work closely with community members and organizations to identify important health topics, connect resources for better health, and advance health equity.
Vision
Eliminate barriers and make measurable improvement in the health and well-being of our patients and communities.
Introduction
How is this framework created?
This framework is a co-creation via an ongoing collaborative process with internal stakeholders and local community members and partners. It is a work in progress, to be updated as it evolves.
Why does this framework matter?
This framework provides a foundation of understanding, transparency, and accountability to ground our work towards health equity via community engagement that remains purposeful and values-driven.
Guiding Values
We arrive at solutions with communities while building upon local capacity, investing local economically, and bolstering community leadership.
Healing is not only a crucial goal, but also a central practice of our work. Our projects recognize historical legacies of oppression and trauma and strive to foster spaces for communal healing. We build relationships with organizations that share this value.
We believe that health justice emerges from equitable and culturally safe systems, infrastructure, and opportunities. This requires recognizing and actively working to dismantle systems of oppression based on race, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexuality, socioeconomic status, disability, age, and body shape and size (among others).
We believe healthy communities are ones in which all people control decisions about their health and well-being. This requires equitable projects and systems in which communities are involved in design, evaluation, and everyday operation. It also means that we go where we are invited, not self-inserted. We honor the dynamics and fluidity in how each community defines and practices self-determination.
We strive for communal and individual well-being wherein all people feel valued, safe, comfortable, happy, and healthy. We also recognize well-being as a meaningful metric of health equity that integrates mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness for a holistic approach to health justice that upholds how people perceive their lives.
Community-Led Solutions
- Decolonize healthcare which currently creates a hierarchical, superior orientation of staff towards patients, and which does not acknowledge communities’ wisdom/ strengths of cultural/traditional healing practices
- Address racist, classist, elitist structural and individual issues that impede effective healthcare in clinics
- Decrease commoditization of health care, especially cost and focus on payment that creates major barriers
- Communicate effectively with communities, considering communities’ oral traditions, organizations, social media influences, and generational differences
- Increase community involvement/ community representation as staff members
- Provide culturally appropriate holistic care for health promotion/ disease prevention, chronic disease management, mental health issues
- Be aware of and respond to variations within communities (i.e., generational and socio-economic
- Build trusting relationships between clinic/staff and communities/patients differences)
- Support culturally responsive staff to have relevant community knowledge, cultural sensitivity, and relationships with communities; desires to work with communities and; skills to create authentic genuine empathetic relationships
- Improve communication about health and healthcare with:
- Appropriate language (consider health literacy, express in clear English, use interpreters, hire bilingual-bicultural staff, and do not use a superior tone)
- Use of effective methods (consider limited technological abilities, community’s oral traditions, and community’s concerns for privacy)
