Massachusetts 211

February 25, 2010 by Sarah Stewart

Yesterday, Charlene and I were able to attend the Blue Hills Community Health Alliance (CHNA 20) winter event.  It's always a pleasure to attend events like these - to be able to meet people from around the community, and hear about the work they are doing. 

We also learned about a great resource, Massachusetts 211.  Donna Jackson, the Community Outreach Coordinator from Massachusetts 211, spoke about the service, which is a way to connect people to the health and human resources they need. By dialing 2-1-1 from any phone in Massachusetts, people are connected to a trained operator, who will help them find the resources they need.  Interpretation in over 100 languages is also available.  The database of services is also available online at www.mass211.org.  Organizations can check online to make sure they are listed as a resource, and to ensure that their information is correct and up-to-date.  Folks at the meeting were excited about this resource, both as a way to connect people to services, and as a way to let people know about the services they offer. 

If you are not already linked into your local CHNA (Community Health Network Area), I would encourage you to find out about how to get involved.  CHNAs provide great professional development and networking opportunities, and often have funding opportunities as well.  To find out more about CHNAs, and to learn about the 5 CHNAs in the Metrowest region, see http://healthier-communities.org/info/chna.

Cultural Humility

February 9, 2010 by Stacy Carruth

The RCHC recently had a community advisory board meeting and as part of the agenda, we discussed cultural competency. For the past 5 years or so, we’ve had an on-going effort to address cultural competency in several key areas of our work (CHNA/prevention coalitions, research and policy development, youth development, library, etc.). We wanted to get ideas from the board on how we could evaluate two things 1. our efforts to make our trainings, services and library as culturally relevant as possible 2. our support to communities in working towards cultural competence. One thing that came up immediately was a question about how we define cultural competence. A board member stressed the need to share our definition of cultural competence because if there’s no definition people would just think of race, and ethnicity and we tend to define it much more broadly than this. Knowing how a coalition defines cultural competence is also critical us in evaluating how well we are supporting them in their efforts. If a community hasn’t articulated for us how they define cultural competency - and their goals in working towards cultural competency - we cannot target our support or assess how effective our support is to them. This highlighted for us that the RCHC and our community partners may not be defining terms in the same way, and defining our terms is a good place to start.

Finally, we discussed the term cultural competency itself, and one board member said that she was bothered by the term “competency.” A board member asked, “Is anyone ever really culturally competent?” Cultural competency is a learning process. We’re never there. She preferred the term “cultural humility.”  
The reading selection for our next RCHC journal club is titled “Cultural Humility Versus Cultural Competence: A Critical Distinction in Defining Physician Training Outcomes in Multicultural Education” by Melanie Tervalon, MD, MPH and Jann Murray-García, MD, MPH. If you’re interested in cultural competency, you might want to check this out.

Generosity & Teamwork

January 27, 2010 by Charlene Julien

http://www.healthier-communities.org/files/Ayiti01.png
 
       When asked at our Tuesday January 12th mid-day staff meeting to write a blog about my work trip in Haiti, which lasted from Saturday December 26th to Sunday January 10th, I was thrilled. Mostly because I saw some amazing work being done throughout Haiti, particularly at UCNH, a university in Limbe, Haiti. Of course life got in the way since that Tuesday January 12th staff request. Then a few hours later, an earthquake struck Haiti’s political, economic and social center thus uniting me with tens of thousands of strangers, family members and new friends worldwide on a search to locate loved ones in Haiti.
 
        Although it’s been two weeks and the media seems to have moved on (or back) to Tiger Woods drama, the reality for millions of Haitians and those who love Haiti worldwide that the island that’s been seen as home now serves as a graveyard for those who are dead and those fighting to stay alive remains palpable and within our consciousness throughout each day, if not hour. There are those who have started the grieving stage, with or without the confirmation of a body. And there are those of us whose relatives survived and we’re trying to find ways, from abroad to help keep them and others alive is a major challenge. There are also those who are a combination of the above two and are channeling their efforts running non-stop fundraisers and coordinating aid from here to get to those unreached.
 
           This tragedy is a painful illustration of what can happen when government and civic involvement are virtually non-existent compounded with a natural disaster. I will not get into the politics of that issue now but they are major factors in the magnitude of the devastation. The rebuilding process of Haiti will require great leadership from the Haitian government and true partnership from the international community. 
 
           This earthquake that shattered millions of lives has also provided a snapshot of one of humanity’s best traits, generosity. This generosity has stretched from individuals and governments from around the globe to their fellow man in Delmas, Carrefour, Petionville, and Leogane when literally “things fall apart”. If one positive thing can be said about this hellish experience it is that the human spirit not only exists but it also binds each of us to another. 
 
           With that said, I leave you with a Haitian proverb that epitomizes the teamwork that Haitians and members of the international community are engaged in and one of the core messages that we at the Regional Center promote in building healthy communities: 
“Men anpil, chay pa lou” or “Many hands make the load light.”
 
 
I will write about my recent work-trip in Haiti in a later blog.

Outliers: The Story of Success (and maybe health, too)

December 31, 2009 by Sarah Stewart

I recently read Malcom Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. I really enjoyed the book, especially the first half or so. The book takes a critical look into what makes people successful. In it, Gladwell argues that success is not just a result of ability and hard work, but that being at the right place, at the right time, and in the right environment are equally (if not more) important. Although the book explores success, I think that some of Gladwell’s conclusions have important implications for how we think about health.  

 
Gladwell actually begins the book by telling the story of a town in Ohio where residents have really low rates of just about every disease you can think of. The widespread good health, however, was not because the town residents had healthier behaviors – they didn’t. The physicians who studied the town came to the conclusion that it was the social structure of the town that made everyone so healthy. This was a place where everyone really took care of each other. As Gladwell states,
 
“…they wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was part of, and who their friends and family were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”
 
I love this example because it demonstrates that it takes the whole community to make the individuals in that community healthy. I also appreciate how Gladwell uses this to help us think beyond the individual when we think about health.   Although he doesn’t focus on health specifically throughout the rest of the book, Gladwell provides many concrete examples of how the environment affects outcomes. It’s worth a read - if you are interested, we’ve added it to our library collection.
 

Building the right leadership

August 13, 2009 by Emily Bhargava

I recently read an article called “Six of our Board members are in Prison” http://www.blueavocado.org/node/392 that interviews members of the board of an organization called Justice Now www.justicenow.org. Not only does the article explore Justice Now’s success in overcoming logistical barriers (like prison) to keep its meetings running, keep communication lines open and keep members engaged, but it also exemplifies the best of cultural competence and relevance. We often talk about how important it is to involve the people that we hope to serve, and to involve them in meaningful ways. We try to actively involve youth in the leadership and decision-making of youth coalitions, involve those who are using substances in overdose prevention efforts and involve Brazilian community members in the design of programs that target the Brazilian population. All too often though, the challenges of meeting times, translation equipment, and creating safe spaces compound the problems of time and resources to mean that only service providers and academicians end up in the meetings, having the conversations and making the decisions within social services. Even focus groups and surveys with target populations aren’t the same as being part of the ongoing leadership of a group. Justice Now’s success helps remind me once again that involving the right people takes a lot of planning, involves a lot of time, and is worth every bit of effort that goes into it.