A Community-Partnered Approach
In the early phase one of our key leadership accomplishments was figuring out an operational structure for working with communities, selecting communities for participation, and determining how we were going to us the four levers of community resilience—education, engagement, community self-sufficiency, and partnerships—as our conceptual framework.
- We held a series of starter meetings with representatives drawn from the whole community.
- We created three working groups that met regularly in the first year-and-a-half of the project’s formative stages. This helped us identify priority areas for community resilience.
- The impetus for these meetings was drawn from a community-partnered approach to leadership, which we adapted for the entire project.
- We applied these principles of partnered work at all stages. The leadership team collaborated on planning, implementation, and evaluation; and we encouraged the coalitions to develop along the same lines.