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Presentation Description:
Public participation and citizen engagement have a long and troubled history in public health and urban planning. While the intention is to inject a healthy dose of local lay wisdom into otherwise paternalistic expert-led initiatives designed to improve local health and wellbeing, decades of practice have not translated into an entirely satisfying experience for communities or program managers.
Building on rich traditions of asset-based community development, systems theory, complexity science, and collective impact, as well as 20 years of accumulated experience at the East Scarborough Storefront, the Connected Community Approach centres geographic communities, the places where people live and interact, as the focal point of systems change work. It recognizes communities as relational ecosystems, and the people in those ecosystems as agents of change. CCA is a set of principles and practical approaches known as “the 10 keys” that can be adopted and adapted to address various systemic issues in ways that are grounded in the specific community contexts, and that explicitly call for enhanced forms of relational accountability to marginalized communities on the part of formal institutions.
In this presentation, we explore the genesis and key features of a Connected Community Approach, and implications for community-based public health and community resilience building work, drawing on empirical research in 6 racialized low income neighbourhoods in Toronto.
Objectives:
-Understand the nature of and need for a Connected Community Approach to urban change-making, in the wider context of debates concerning approaches to public participation and citizen engagement in public health and urban planning
-Discern key differences between Collective Impact approaches and a Connected Community Approach
-Apply a relational approach to understanding community development and systems change
More about this speaker:
Blake Poland is Associate Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Senior Fellow with the Centre for Critical Qualitative Health Research, and Director of the Collaborative Specialization in Community Development. Trained initially as a health geographer, his areas of specialization include community resilience, sustainability transitions, prefigurative social movements as agents of change, qualitative and dialogical methods, the settings approach in health promotion, and community development as an arena of practice for health and social care professionals.
For questions, please contact: director.novonordiskhp@utoronto.ca
Website: healthypopulationsnetwork.utoronto.ca
X: @NHP_UofT
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