Hello, AEA365 community! Liz DiLuzio here, Lead Curator of the blog. This week is Individuals Week, which means we take a break from our themed weeks and spotlight the Hot Tips, Cool Tricks, Rad Resources and Lessons Learned from any evaluator interested in sharing. Would you like to contribute to future individuals weeks? Email me at AEA365@eval.org with an idea or a draft and we will make it happen.
Hi, we are Cheryl Arndt, PhD and Samantha Shaak, PhD writing to you from the Leonard Parker Pool Institute for Health (LPPIH) in Allentown, PA. The institute, which was founded in 2021, has a unique decades-long history that you can read about here.
At LPPIH, we are fortunate to be partnering with national thought-leaders who help us move forward with our work. We thought that other evaluators could benefit from knowing what we have learned about national partnerships. Specifically, our partners have helped us to: clarify the role of the health system in addressing social determinants of healthy, engage our community authentically, and access relevant data, and center equity in our place-based work.
As we considered contracting with thought leaders, we looked at who was leading meaningful community development work across the county. Also of paramount importance was finding organizations whose values and focus areas align with ours. For example, Allentown has been named a BUILD Health Challenge Community for 2023-2026. BUILD stands for bold, upstream, integrated, local, and data-driven—all principles that the institute aspires to operationalize. Partnering with BUILD Health has provided us with coaching, training, and evaluation support and given us access to other communities in our cohort. BUILD Health has also helped us to deepen and broaden our efforts related to equity. Other national partners include The Rippel Foundation, Enterprise Community Partners, and the Lupton Center at Focused Community Strategies. These partners have long track-records of success in working with hospital systems and/or communities.
There are a number of benefits offered by each of our national partners. And, there are several characteristics that they all share which make them highly valued collaborators for us at the LPPIH. Our partners:
- provide us with external validity and access to other experienced communities that we can learn from
- are aligned with our values and focus areas
- share our emphasis on equity, disparities, and place-based work
- are focused on sustainable, systemic changes
- employ rigorous methodologies and evidence-based practices
- are eager to engage in a bi-directional relationship with us which facilitates cross learnings and allows us to co-create solutions
Lessons Learned
Community development work is complex. We have found that no one model can help us to fully address the complexity of our work. So instead, we leverage a variety of thought leaders to help us effectively collaborate with local partners, deepen our efforts at authentic community engagement, and bridge the gap between health care and the community. Through training and technical assistance, our partners have assisted us with data collection and use processes as well as evaluation guidance. Finally, they are assisting us with case-building and communicating our message internally, externally, and nationally.
Rad Resources
To hear from some of our partners about their experience working with us and what makes us good partners for them, click on this four-minute video.
We wish you all well with partnerships of your own!
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