Public Health in Oregon - Join The Conversation

Apply for a CHP grant to energize your neighborhood or community!

By: CHP | Posted on: February 16th, 2009 | Share:
Categories: Economic Issues • Education • Public Health • Rural Health • Urban Issues

Would you like a kick-start the process of transforming your community into a more health-focused place to live?

Consider applying for a small Community Health Priorities grant to support your community engagement efforts.

We are looking for neighborhoods and communities that want to build momentum for community action. For example, you might want to host community meetings to brainstorm ideas and develop a plan for change. A CHP grant would be able to help support flyers, publicity, and even refreshments for your meetings. In exchange, we ask that you document the meetings, share with us who attended, and share with us the results of the conversation. We’d love it if you also told others about our project!

Our goal with these grants is to support grassroots-led community discussions that ask community residents to think about health beyond just medical care. Tell us:
1) Who your organization,coalition , or association is and what is your role in the community?
2) How you will engage your community and why do you think that is a good way to do so (will you use town hall formats? screen Unnatural Causes or another documentary series and then hold a discussion? perhaps you want to use social drama?). We want to hear about creative, culturally appropriate ideas that work for your community.
3) What will the nature of the conversations will be? Where will they be held?
4) When will the series begin and end?
5) How will you use the funds? (A simple budget will do.)
6) Lastly, how will you promote our Community Health Priorities website as one way to continue the dialogue and to connect with others working on similar issues?

Along with the financial benefit, the process will allow you to learn from previous grantees and even gain some advice and counsel from CHP staff. You can read about some of this work in our “Creating a new Culture of Health” ad.

An example of such a grant is the Health Equity Alliance in Corvallis - a group of residents from the Corvallis area seeking to address health inequalities locally.

During spring 2008, this group formed to discuss health inequality within the Corvallis community using the Unnatural Causes documentary series as a tool. After these meetings, they concluded that more similar sessions would be very helpful to address health issues at a broader level in their community.

Health Equity Alliance seeks to “engage community stakeholders in discussions to broaden understanding of factors that contribute to health inequality and to identify opportunities for how public and private organizations can contribute to the development of healthy communities.”

With support from a Community Health Priorities grant, the Health Equity Alliance sponsored the following community forums:

Corvallis Forum April 2008 – 120 people
Corvallis Community Café October 2008 – 85 people
Monroe Community Café October 2008 – 20 people

In addition, they trained local leaders to facilitate presentation of the Unnatural Causes Series and provided technical assistance for the Monroe community grant to Oregon Solutions. To document the meetings, they collected names and email addresses and took photos. The mayor attended the first meeting and the community discussion were recorded and aired on their local public TV station (Channel 29).  A local university group even turned their discussions into podcasts available for free on itunes.

The Health Equity Alliance plans to continue to sponsor community forums and small group discussions, facilitate coordination between groups and serve as a resource to our group’s members and the community. They also plan to identify mechanisms to partner with other groups who are using health equity assessment tools to better understand the root causes of health inequality at the local level.

Your process doesn’t have to be as well-organized and detailed as theirs. You can apply for a grant for up to $5,000.

For more information on this program, contact David Rebanal of the Northwest Health Foundation at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and send us your initial ideas.

For more information on the Health Equity Alliance, feel free to contact Karen Levy Keon at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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