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Community Organizing & Advocacy - Coggle Diagram
Community Organizing & Advocacy
The Arts including literature. music, dance, painting, and photography are powerful tools and act as a vehicle for community organizing and building.
Community building and organizing lies in its ability to communicate a message and elicit an emotional response.
The concept of photovoice, developed in the mid-1990s and subsequently used in many parts of the world helps people visually capture their concerns, engage in critical dialogue, and use their photographs and deeper reflections as a basis for action to promote change
Community-based art is community practice providing opportunities for co-creation and partnership building.
Dorothy Nyswander suggests that organizers, as part of their work, need to familiarize themselves with a people’s cultural expressions. In the community, the arts can promote organizing for health in multiple ways:
Involves those who might be disinterested or intimidated by more explicitly health-oriented or community-organizing activities. The arts make get- ting involved fun.
The arts can be a valuable strategy as part of community assessments
The arts are powerful messengers that can increase awareness and relay health education messages
The Arts can bring a attention to an issue. A cultural rendering of an issue will often catch people’s attention, and may help change their perceptions.
Cultural forms of expression rooted in the community may not only give voice to shared concerns, they may also con- tribute to the community’s collective life, whether through celebration, ritual, or mourning.
The Arts promote a culture of health
The creative process of the arts can help create the conditions in which individuals and communities can become empowered
Community-led action at the community scale has proved vital to addressing complex health inequities during the COVID-19 pandemic
Community organizations, partnered with public health, health care, and other government services, have demonstrated how to meet equity needs within a targeted universalist approach to public health where population-level goals and established targeted processes are set to achieve those goals.
Focusing on the role of community can support epistemic justice in public health in which diverse forms of community knowledge and ways of knowing are better understood. Four key actions by which public health in Canada can more fully incorporate and support the capacity of communities beyond the COVID-19 crisis:
Action 2: Ensure accountability for community involvement in governance and decision-making through performance indicators.
Action 3: Build community and equity into new data architectures by supporting community organizations’ technology and data needs, incorporating and respecting community knowledge
Action 4: Confront structural and historic barriers to systems transformation.
Action. 1: Strengthen the work of health and wellbeing at the community scale. Ensure community organizations are full partners in locally driven health and social services networks and replace burdensome project-baed funding for community organizations with stable funding.
Covid-19 has further exacerbated health inequities. A renewal of public health post-COVID-19 is an opportunity to incorporate community participation into public health systems.
There needs to be more focus on sharing power, ensuring clear accountabilities, and centring community self-determination through processes of engagement, coproduction, and governance.
Mandating and valuing community participation throughout decision-making structures and processes;
data systems at the neighbourhood scale, linked as part of a dynamic and learning public health system
investing in trusted, community-led infrastructure