Emily Bhargava's blog
After years of hard work by a dedicated and growing coalition co-led by Stacy Carruth of the Regional Center, the MBTA has agreed to take alcohol ads off trains and buses beginning July 1st! This success represents the dedication and the involvement of a wide range of young people, professionals and concerned citizens who recognize that it makes good public health sense and good financial sense to limit the exposure of young people to alcohol advertisements. While there is still a bill being considered that would ban alcohol ads on all state-owned property, the T’s recent announcement accomplishes a large component of what the SAFE-MA coalition had hoped to achieve. This is a victory for our youth and for public health in Massachusetts. For more information about the MBTA’s decision and about the tactics that the SAFE-MA coalition used to reach this historic day, see an article from Tuesday’s Boston Globe http://articles.boston.com/2012-01-24/yourtown/30660001_1_alcohol-ads-transit-agency-ad-revenue#.TyASGgxOd-U.email. Congratulations to all the members of SAFE-MA and to those of you who called the MBTA or called your legislators to help make this happen.
JOB POSTING
Community Health Specialist
The Regional Center for Healthy Communities is looking to create a team of professionals with high levels of expertise in health promotion; community participatory data collection, analysis, and presentation;coalition development; community organizing; social determinants of health; and systems-level approaches for prevention and health promotion. We are committed to building a culturally diverse staff that enables us to effectively serve our communities.
Responsibilities:
- Provides technical assistance, consultation, and training for emerging and existing community groups, coalitions, boards of health, and other service providers to increase their capacity to develop community health promotion programs, policy initiatives and implement community-level strategies.
- Promotes inclusive strategies to engage all sectors of the community with particular emphasis on those under-served.
- Plans, organizes, and implements workshops and meetings that promote public health goals and collaboration among communities.
- Maintains knowledge of current prevention and public health theories and strategies, as well as community organizations, agencies, and leaders.
- Documents best practices and community achievements within the region for a wide range of audiences
- Oversees project management for certain community groups in the region.
Qualifications:
· Experience and knowledge of prevention theory/health promotion, youth development, coalition building, the healthy communities framework, and community organizing and engagement.
· Demonstrated experience in facilitating group decision-making.
· Strong interpersonal, analytical, organizational, planning and verbal and written communication skills a must.
· The ability to collaborate with diverse groups focused on health promotion, prevention, and community organizing.
· Experience in research and evaluation design, community health assessment, research and data analysis highly desirable.
- Demonstrated experience in building the capacity of coalitions for health promotion
- Project management experience highly preferred.
· Degree in Public Health, Public Policy, Community Development, Social Work (macro), or Education preferred. Masters degree highly desirable.
· Bilingual/bicultural with experience working with high-risk populations highly desirable.
· Ability to travel (primarily within the Metrowest region) required. Travel is frequent.
No phone calls, please.
Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis.
Interested?
To apply, send cover letter and resume by July 10, 2011 to:
Bill Holden
Regional Center For Healthy Communities
552 Massachusetts Ave, Suite 203
Cambridge, MA 02139
E-mail: bholden@healthier-communities.org
Over the years we’ve fielded a lot of questions about exactly how we’re connected to Mount Auburn Hospital, what our relationship is to the other Regional Centers, what our relationship is to DPH, and why our work focuses so heavily on substance abuse prevention. In response, we recently added an organizational chart to the “about us” page on our website. http://www.healthier-communities.org/info/aboutrchc.
As you can see from the chart, the short answer to all of the questions is “it’s very complicated”. We’re connected in one way or another to innumerable entities throughout the state, and in many cases we’re connected to the same entities in multiple ways. The longer answer is that the Regional Centers and the Massachusetts Partnership for Healthy Communities make up a technical assistance system for the whole of Massachusetts. We are funded to help coalitions and communities be more effective and efficient at their own prevention and health promotion efforts. We connect them to one another, we keep an eye on the literature about prevention and collaboration, we provide resources and coaching, and we facilitate many hard conversations. If you look carefully at the organizational chart you’ll see that our work with the CHNAs is funded differently than our work with substance abuse coalitions, and that each of the Regional Centers is a program of a different organization. Take some time to explore the chart and please feel free to contact us with any questions that it can’t answer. Despite its complexity, the chart still oversimplifies our connections to all of the groups in our region, but we hope it helps to put our work in context.
On Wednesday the 20th the MACDC and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston co-sponsored a Healthy Communities conference. The focus of the day was the intersection between Community Development and health. While the definitions sometimes got confusingly cloudy during panel presentations (were we thinking about health simply as healthcare or as the overall well-being of community residents? Did the “health sector” include small community-based organizations that are doing youth development, community organizing or substance abuse prevention? For that matter, since community development corporations seem to do so many different things, aren’t some of them already engaged in health? Where’s the line between all of these things?) the general idea was that in fact the lines are blurry and that blurring them further is a good thing. We know that poverty reduction improve health outcomes. We know that economic development contributes to poverty reduction. In fact, we know that addressing the social determinants of health, like poverty, is one of the most efficient ways to improve the health of a community. As a side benefit, the prevention that comes from poverty eradication would decrease healthcare costs and feed back into the cycle of building economic stability that will in turn further increase health. So in fact, we’re all partners in this game of health promotion.
I left with a few comforts and a few frustrations. I was comforted to know that I have a language to share the conversation of health improvement with my colleagues at banks and CDCs, and I was comforted to know that the collaborations and the approach of Healthy Communities are catching on. However, my frustrations followed me home. For some reason any conversations about reducing healthcare costs through capitation and the prevention that it will incentivize are still limited to the kind of prevention that takes place in the doctor’s office (vaccinations, weight-loss conversations, screenings…) when we could be directing some of the prevention dollars to community-level change that will have a much more significant and sustainable impact on health. Also, with all the energy and talk around healthy communities, we should be at each others’ tables. Yet I, a community-builder, left without a good sense of when and where the folks from Banks, CDCs, health centers and foundations are having these conversations. How can we, a Healthy Communities system with so much experience to share, get involved?
The Regional Center is fully staffed for the first time in many months! Elizabeth Theriault has joined us to fill a newly-created position to work with the Community Health Network Areas (CHNAs) in our region. The CHNA support positions are a wonderful development. With these positions, Charlene, who has been at the center for many motnhs now, and Elizabeth, our newest addition, will be able to devote all of their attention to building the capacity of the 5 Metrowest CHNAs. With members ranging from interested community members to health department directors, city planners, school nurses and everything in between, the CHNAs are vibrant groups that allow cross-border collaboration and resource-sharing to make our communties healthier and more engaged. As the CHNAs carry out community health assessments, they're finding that there are more similarities than differences between towns when it comes to issues of concern and visions for a healthier community. Elizabeth and Charlene are in constant contact with CHNA leadership across the region. They are helping to assure that the CHNAs can have their questions answered, can grow to accomodate new funding and new members, and can be as impactful as possible with their time and money. In addition to responding to CHNAs' requests, the Regional Center's role is to connect CHNAs with one another so that they can share ideas and build on each others' successes. In a state where much of public health is carried out city-by-city and in silos according to the current funding streams, the CHNAs create an opportuntiy for people from all walks of life and all realms of community building to come together to promote health region-by-region. I'd like to officially welcome Elizabeth to the Regional Center's team and I invite you to watch for the results of her hire in your local CHNA. To learn more about your CHNA or to get involved, look under the Community Health Initiatives tab or contact Elizabeth or Charlene through our website.
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.
