Promoting Health Equity - A Resource to Help Communities Address ...

Sharing your work
Some of the products of your work should be shared only among your group’s
partners. These confdential work products can include:
> Strategies to improve or change goals, objectives, or the action plan.
> Plans to address barriers or confict within the partnership.
> Methods to rally more support for the project.
Information shared among partners should remain confdential unless all
partners agree otherwise. A lot of information, however, is appropriate
to share with all community members and with other groups engaged in
efforts similar to yours. Such information sharing among groups is vital to the
success of local, regional, or national efforts to eliminate health disparities.
This workbook, in fact, is largely the product of information sharing by
participants in the “Learning from Doing” forum. Your partnership can share
FORuM SPOTLIGHT
Evaluation Strategies
This example illustrates how an evaluation plan was developed to track
outcomes for a very comprehensive initiative.
The New Deal for Communities initiative is an area-based regeneration
initiative being implemented in 39 of the most deprived communities in
England (see pages 26–27). The initiative supports the intensive regeneration
of neighborhoods through the creation of partnerships between local people,
community and voluntary organizations, local health authorities, businesses,
and government agencies. Each community receives fnancial support to
address a number of key issues, including those related to community health
and the social determinants of health. Action plans include:
> Addressing worklessness (i.e., unemployment or underemployment).
> Improving health.
> Reducing crime.
> Improving educational achievement.
information with the community and with others interested in addressing the
social determinants of health inequitiesin a variety of ways. These include:
> Newsletters.
> Community forums.
> Internet outlets such as Web sites or chat rooms.
> Local newspapers, professional journals, or magazines.
> Local, state and national conferences.
> Informal networks, such as those that operate through libraries, schools,
colleges or universities, parks or recreation centers, faith-based
organizations, small businesses, and word of mouth.
> Flyers distributed in various ways, including door-to-door, at meetings, and
at tables set up in public locations such as supermarkets or on sidewalks. 69
Evaluation of the impact of this multifaceted policy program is complex and
guided by theory-driven evaluation strategies, evaluation fndings from other
effective approaches, and experiential evidence from the community. This
evidence can be documented and incorporated into frameworks, such as
individual or organizational theories of change (i.e., refecting readiness to
change and processes of change). Participants are asked to articulate how
and why they think the actions they are taking will lead to the outcomes
they desire (i.e., pathways of change). Participants’ responses begin to defne
the types of data needed to establish whether the pathways are being
followed and whether expected short- and intermediate-term outcomes are
being achieved.
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