Strengths and challenges of community organizing and policy campaigns for health equity

Ethnic and racial health disparities have challenged public health practitioners for decades, with low-income communities continuing to suffer from poor health due to inequitable social conditions (food insecurity, poverty, crime, pollution) that prevent residents from making healthy choices. The Communities Creating Healthy Environments (CCHE) project was the first national initiative to fund community-based organizations (grantees) to use social justice-based community organizing practices to address the social conditions underlying ethnic and racial health disparities in communities of color. This presentation instructs attendees in the use of the CCHE Change Model: an evaluation framework for assessing the processes and outcomes of community organizing-based health promotion that served as a roadmap for evaluating the organizing strategies and tactics, policy campaigns, and policy outcomes of all 21 CCHE grantees. Attendees will learn how to use three lenses—Social Justice, Culture/Place, Organizational Capacity/Organizing Approach—to increase their understanding of how to ground health promotion policy campaigns in the needs and characteristics of the community. Next, attendees will discover how various community organizing strategies (e.g., growing community, leader, and ally base, reframing policy messages) impact the intermediate benchmarks/outcomes (e.g., challenging structural inequities in the environment, building community power) and final outcomes—policy wins impacting food and recreation access—of these campaigns. Upon completion of this presentation, attendees will be familiar with how integrating community organizing into health promotion may lead to sustainable reductions in childhood obesity and other health disparities within communities of color.