It’s clear that a broad range of individuals and groups play an important part in creating and maintaining safe, healthy communities in which every person’s well-being is valued equally. Yet this message isn’t always conveyed outside the public health community—or even, at times, within it.
Prevention Institute took an opportunity to share our viewpoint about the wide-ranging nature of public health with a new audience by writing for a Public Library of Science (PLOS) blog today. PLOS is an open-access publisher of science and medicine articles, whose audience comprises researchers, academic scientists, medical practitioners, policy makers, and journalists. Our post, which appears on the PLOS Public Health Perspectives blog, says in part:
"Increasingly as a discipline, public health is approaching long-standing issues, such as community violence and chronic disease, from a more holistic perspective that allows us to see the relationships between these issues, and start working together toward real solutions. We know that people are less likely to be active if their streets and local parks aren’t safe, and that children who are scared at school can’t focus on learning. Violence has a cascading effect on education, physical activity, community trust, and well-being, and ultimately, economic and social opportunity. To change this, we call on nontraditional public health actors like schoolteachers, neighborhood watch groups, libraries and city parks and recreation departments, to craft solutions together".
Prevention Institute focuses deeply on engaging nontraditional partners in public health, and has developed many resources to help diverse groups work together. Our Developing Effective Coalitions: An 8-Step Guide helps partnerships launch and stabilize successfully by supporting advocates and practitioners in every aspect of the process—from determining the appropriateness of a coalition to selecting members, defining key elements, maintaining vitality, and conducting ongoing evaluations. Collaboration Multiplier helps coalitions target the needs and skill sets of a coalition, as well as individual entities within the coalition, thus multiplying collective accomplishments. To read about more of our tools, visit our website.
You can the rest of our PLOS blog post here.
