Advancing Public Health Through Community Partnerships: Resources and Strategies
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Community partnerships enhance the effectiveness and reach of foundational public health services (FPHS). By leveraging local expertise, resources, and building trust, these collaborations support key public health capabilities such as community health assessments and improvement plans. Collaborating with community organizations, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders strengthens public health infrastructure, reduces health disparities, and ensures a coordinated local response to emerging health challenges. By integrating diverse perspectives and fostering collective action, community partnerships drive sustainable, community-driven solutions addressing both immediate public health needs and long-term community health outcomes.
Health departments can strengthen community partnerships by implementing strategic approaches that foster collaboration and trust. Some key strategies include transparent communication, frequent stakeholder engagement, formalization through Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) or coalitions, and inclusion of partner perspectives from across the FPHS. Additionally, service and resource sharing approaches are a key strategy when working across organizational boundaries. Prioritizing these strategies enables health departments to develop lasting partnerships that drive community-centered public health improvements.
The Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) provides health department recipients with funding and technical support to invest in the planning and development of meaningful community partnerships. These partnerships build local and regional capacity aimed at reducing health disparities and achieving population health goals. The PHIG National Partners have compiled the resources and opportunities shared below to assist public health agencies in strengthening their community partnership efforts.
Resources to Strengthen Community Partnership
- Engaging Partners in a Virtual Space
ASTHO developed this toolkit, which focuses on virtual engagement techniques to improve working relationships between a health agency’s internal staff and external partners. Successful and intentional virtual engagement will improve an agency’s administrative readiness and support efforts to retain public health professionals in the workforce. Readers can expect information beneficial to any virtual meeting or engagement process. - Investing in Indiana’s Public Health Infrastructure Through Community-Driven Policy Change
This case study showcases Indiana’s community-inclusive efforts to pass SB 4, a historic investment in the state’s public health funding and restructuring of its public health system. It showcases how the Governor’s Public Health Commission and the Indiana Department of Health approached community listening sessions, formulated recommendations, and successfully built legislative support to reform the state’s public health system. - A Community Guide to Advance Health Equity
This guide presents the work of five community partners who led COVID-19 vaccine equity initiatives in their communities with support and power sharing from government health agencies. It offers practical guidance that public health agencies can operationalize to replicate the community partnerships presented to address community health disparities in their localities. - P2P Community Health Improvement Plan Series
This free and self-paced training from the Michigan Public Health Training Center in Region V is a three-part series that will introduce the community health improvement plan (CHIP), address how to identify community health priorities, and guide you through writing your CHIP. The CHIP process requires thoughtful and authentic engagement with community health partners. - Service and Resource Sharing
This set of resources from the PHAB Center for Innovation helps public health departments and systems collaborate and share across boundaries to encourage better effectiveness and efficiency in the communities they serve. Service and resource sharing among health departments is when insights, expertise, techniques, and tools are shared across organizational boundaries—and can range from informal to formal approaches. Included via the link is a Service and Resource Sharing Roadmap, guidance for state health departments to implement service sharing from a state-system approach, example MOUs, and more. These tools can help set up community partnerships for success. - Collaborative Trust Scale
Working across organizational boundaries requires building and strengthening trust with partners. This tool may help evaluate levels of trust between collaboration partner organizations, when looking to share services or resources across these organizations.
Opportunities from the PHIG Partners
Coalitions: Community Partners Joining Forces for Public Health
When: Tuesday, May 13, 1-2 p.m. ET
Increasingly, public health work requires the participation of a variety of partners to address difficult issues. We do this through coalitions. Hosted by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Public Health Training Center, this webinar explores a logical, organized way to plan and maintain a coalition using the Community Governance Model to guide the functioning of the coalition. At the conclusion of this webinar, participants will be able to define a coalition, use the Community Governance Model to select members of a specific coalition, describe how to use a management process to stimulate participation, and list three examples of proximal outcomes for a community-based coalition.
Service and Resource Sharing Webinar Archives
Interested in learning more about how service and resource sharing approaches can be implemented? Visit this series of learning sessions, focused on the nuts and bolts, state-wide strategies, local health department approaches, and examples from the field.
PHIG recipients looking for additional resources or assistance related to community partnerships can request technical assistance from the National Partners through the PHIVE portal.