Partnering for Healthier Communities

Public health agencies play a vital role as service providers and as catalysts, conveners, and funders for community partnerships.  Creating community partnerships can be challenging, especially when prospective partners bring difference missions, cultures, structures, and goals to the table.

At CHS we help public health agencies accomplish their goals for creating healthier communities in collaboration with local partners.  Over the past two decades we have helped public health agencies develop partnerships to assess needs and create collaborative strategies in a variety of community settings.

Scroll down to learn more about our strategy solutions and toolkit for public agency initiatives.

A Proven Set of Solutions

When it comes to creating healthier communities, public agencies can make a huge positive difference by working through partnerships with local nonprofits and business organizations. We offer a set of proven solutions to help public agencies accomplish their goals through community partnership.

Effective strategy begins with a deep understanding of community needs.  We help public agencies develop community needs assessments that are strategically designed to engage community members and organizations as partners in producing the assessment. We can help you:

  • Engage key community partners
  • Define the scope of the community needs assessment
  • Analyze quantitative indicators of community health and well-being
  • Generate community member insights about community needs, assets, gaps, and opportunities
  • Develop community maps that illustrate relationships between community needs and assets
  • Capture results in a community needs assessment report.

Strategy is a process of defining and refining the goals and strategies for your organization or program. We help public agencies design and execute collaborative strategies that are focused on delivering value, and adaptable to rapidly changing conditions.  We can help you:

  • Engage community stakeholders as strategy partners
  • Clarify the strategic mission or purpose
  • Analyze the community landscape
  • Identify the community populations you will serve
  • Specify intended results and key performance indicators
  • Identify key capabilities and partnerships that will be required for effective execution.
  • Produce a strategic plan that defines the vision, mission, goals, partners, funders, key actions, key performance indicators, and time horizons.

Collaborative strategy often results in innovative ideas for collaborative community programs and service.  We can help you:

  • Collaborative with community partners to identify opportunities for collaboration
  • Design collaborative programs that are evidence-informed and structured to work in your local context
  • Build community capacity for program implementation
  • Monitor implementation to keep the program on track
  • Facilitate continuous quality improvement to assure the best possible outcomes
  • Design and conduct evaluations that are practical and strategically focused to inform key stakeholders

Collaborative strategies offer new opportunities for collective community impact. We help our clients develop evaluation approaches that recognize the role of each collaborating partner, and assess the collective impact of the program or initiative.  CHS can help you:

  • Identify key audiences for evaluation reporting
  • Define the scope of the evaluation
  • Create an efficient evaluation design
  • Collect and analyze evaluation data
  • Analyze results to inform organizational learning and program improvement
  • Report results in ways that demonstrate value to partners, funders, and the community

Demonstrating community value to key stakeholders is a strategic imperative for sustaining collaborative initiatives.  We can help you:

  • Identify key funders, partners, and other stakeholders who need to understand the value of the collaboration
  • Design key ‘value messages,’ or concise statements of the value the collaboration delivers
  • Develop key ‘value indicators’ that support your value messages (these can be quantitative or qualitative)
  • Create a communication strategy to deliver the right information in the right format at the right time
  • Optimize the collaborative value strategy over time in response to changes in the operating landscape.

An Extensive Toolkit

Over decades of experience we have developed an extensive set of tools and techniques to support solutions for public agencies and their partners We mix and match these tools as needed to address the particular objectives of our clients.

Strategic design and facilitation of meetings among key stakeholders for the purpose of optimizing community needs assessment, strategic development, program development, and community impact.

Design and delivery of action learning programs to help teams solve challenges, create innovations, and build individual and team skills.

Strategic assessment and communication of the positive community impact created by a particular organization or program.

Strategic analysis of community demographics, health indicators, and social indicators to inform community needs assessment, strategic planning, program development, and community impact analysis.

Strategic design, execution, and analysis of interviews with key stakeholders, either individually or in group settings, to inform community needs assessment, strategic planning, program development, and community impact analysis.

Strategic analysis of local demographics, geography, and other factors to inform decisions about where to locate community programs and services.

Strategic mapping and geospatial analysis to foster understanding of community needs and assets as information for community needs assessment, strategic planning, program development, and community impact analysis.

Strategic planning, execution, and analysis of surveys with community members and other community stakeholders to inform community needs assessment, strategic planning, program development, and community impact analysis.

Training and technical assistance to help teams apply human-centered design principles in problem-solving and innovation.

Strategic analysis of current and proposed policies to understand the potential impact on the community and the future of the organization.

Systematic searching for promising practices, programs, and policies that can be adapted to solve challenges within local organizations and communities,

Systematic design of programs and services with an emphasis on evidence-based design, and with particular attention to the populations to be served, the individual outcomes to be realized, and community impacts to be achieved.

Systematic evaluation of programs and serves to determine their affect on individual outcomes and community impacts, with an emphasize on learning, program improvement, and demonstrating community impact.

Training, tools, technical assistance, and strategy coaching to help teams optimize quality assurance and quality improvement.

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