CTSI Community Engagement Key Function Glossary of Terms
Advance: v: to accelerate the growth or progress of (Webster Dictionary)
Asset-Based Community Development: a process that involves the community in making an inventory of assets and capacity, building relationships, developing a vision of the future, and leveraging internal and external resources to support actions to achieve it (The Community Toolbox, Identifying Community Assets and Resources)
Capacity Building: an increase in a group’s abilities to define, assess, analyze and act on health and other concerns of importance to their members’ (Labonte and Laverack, 2001).
Collaboration: process by which groups come together and establish a formal commitment to work together to achieve common goals and objectives through joint ownership of the work and shared risks, results, and rewards (NACCHO, Pulling Together, 2008)
Community: 1. a group of individuals organized into a unit or manifesting some unifying trait or common interest; (Institute of Medicine, 2003). 2. community need not be defined solely by geography. It can refer to a group that self-identifies by age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, illness, or health condition. It can refer to a common interest or cause, a sense of identification or shared emotional connection, shared values or norms, mutual influence, common interest, or commitment to meeting a shared need. (CCPH Board of Directors, 2005)
Community Assets: the full breadth of people, organizational, and institutional resources that exist in a community. (Beaulieu, 2002)
Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR): a collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings. CBPR begins with a research topic of importance to the community and has the aim of combining knowledge with action and achieving social change. (W.K. Kellogg Community Health Scholars Program, 2001)
Community Engagement in Research (CEnR): CEnR is a process of inclusive participation that supports mutual respect of values, strategies, and actions for authentic partnership of people affiliated with or self-identified by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations to address issues affecting the well-being of the community or focus. (Ahmed & Palermo, 2008).
Community Engaged Research (CER): CER is a core element of any research effort involving communities. It requires academic members to become part of the community and community members to become part of the research team, thereby creating a unique working and learning environment before, during, and after the research
Community Capacity: the characteristics of communities that affect their ability to identify, mobilize, and address social and public health problems. (McLeroy,1996).
Community Engagement: a process that requires power sharing, maintenance of equity, and flexibility in pursuing goals, methods, and time frames to fit the priorities, needs, and capacities within the cultural context of communities. In research, community engagement is a process of inclusive participation that supports mutual respect of values, strategies, and actions for authentic partnership of people affiliated with or self-identified by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations to address issues affecting the well-being of the community of focus. (Ahmed & Palermo, 2008)
Community Health: a field of public health that concerns itself with the study and betterment of the health characteristics of communities. (Web Definition)
Community Health Improvement: a systematic effort that assesses community needs and assets, prioritizes health-related problems and issues, analyzes problems for their causative factors, develops evidence-based intervention strategies based on those analyses, links stakeholders to implementation efforts through performance monitoring, and evaluates the effect of interventions in the community. (Turnock, 2009)
Community Needs: community-defined issues, problems or opportunities (Community Needs Assessment Factsheet, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Conduct: v: 1. to bring by or as if by leading; 2 a: to lead from a position of command; b : to direct or take part in the operation or management of (Webster Online Dictionary)
Equitable: fair; just; impartial or reasonable
Foster: v: 1. to give parental care to: nurture; 2. to promote the growth or development of : encourage
Health: 1. broadly defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease (WHO, 1948); 2. a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities." (Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 1986) 3. a personal or community condition that reflects the fullest attainment and expression of physical, mental, environmental, spiritual, and economic potential. (Bruce & S.U. McKane)
Health Disparities: 1. a significant disparity or difference in the overall rate of disease incidence, prevalence, morbidity, mortality or survival rates in a population as compared to the health status of the general population. (Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education Act, 2000); 2.differences in health status among distinct segments of the population including differences that occur by gender, race or ethnicity, education or income, disability, or living in various geographic localities (Virginia Department of Health, 2009)
Health Equity: 1. achieving the optimal level of health for all people. Health equity entails focused societal efforts to address avoidable inequalities by equalizing the conditions for health for all groups, especially for those who have experienced socioeconomic disadvantage or historical injustices. (Virginia Department of Health, 2009); 2.“pursuing equity in health” can be defined as striving to eliminate disparities in health between more and less-advantaged social groups, i.e. groups that occupy different positions in a social hierarchy. (Braveman, 2003)
Health Improvement: the process of advancing health, broadly defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease.
Health Inequity: disparities in health or its social determinants that favor social groups that are already more advantaged. Inequity does not refer generically to any inequalities between any population groups, but very specifically to disparities between groups of people categorized a priori according to some important features of their underlying social position, typically factors that are strongly associated with different levels of social advantage or privilege as characterized by wealth, power, and/or prestige. (Braveman, 2003)
Health Promotion: 1. the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health (Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion, 1986). 2. represents a comprehensive social and political process, it not only embraces actions directed at strengthening the skills and capabilities of individuals, but also action directed towards changing social, environmental and economic conditions so as to alleviate their impact on public and individual health. (WHO Health Promotion Glossary, 1998)
Infrastructure: the underlying foundation or basic framework (Webster Online Dictionary)
Interdisciplinary: combining or involving two or more academic disciplines or fields of study
Interdisciplinary research: research process that directly enforces team building in the service of addressing complex problems in which multicausal explanations might exist. This is compared to multidisciplinary research which acknowledges that research teams may need to represent more than one field of study, but has a division of labor; or transdisciplinary research which moves to a different level of synthesis and integration through the formulation of a new research framework for defining and addressing a problem, which integrates what may have previously been discrete or competing points of view. (Aday, 2005)
Leadership: broadly defined as a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal. (Northouse, 2007)
Link: v: to couple or connect by or as if by a link (Webster Online Dictionary)
Mission: a formal short written statement of the purpose of an organization that guides the actions of the organization, spells out its overall goal, provides a sense of direction, and guides decision-making. (Hill, 2008)
Partnership: individuals or organizations working together in a side-by-side effort to accomplish a common goal with a shared sense of purpose and a shared responsibility for the outcome. (Ohio State University, Building Coalitions Fact Sheet.)
Population Health: 1. an approach to health that aims to improve the health of an entire population and to reduce health inequities among populations. Population health seeks to step beyond the individual-level focus of medicine by addressing a broad range of factors that impact health on a population level, such as environment, social structure, resource distribution, etc. (Minnesota Department of Health, 2008); 2. an approach that considers all factors that influence the health outcomes of a group of individuals, including the distribution of such outcomes within the group."(Kindig, 2003)
Public Health: 1. the fulfillment of society's interest in assuring the conditions in which people can be healthy, which includes organized interdisciplinary efforts that address the physical, mental, and environmental health concerns of communities and populations (Colorado Department of Health, 2008 based on a definition by the Institute of Medicine, 1988)
Social Determinants of Health: the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, including the social, economic, and political resources and structures that influence health outcomes. (World Health Organization, 2003)
Social Justice: is the equitable distribution of social, economic and political resources, opportunities, and responsibilities and their consequences. In public health, a social justice framework includes the premise that marginalization based on race, class, gender, and other social classifications underlies the inequitable distribution of social, economic and political resources and opportunities. This unequal distribution of resources and opportunities is manifested through inequitable access and exposure to social determinants of health. Through direct and indirect mechanisms, the result is health inequities. (Virginia Department of Health)
Support: v.1. to promote the interests or cause of; 2. to aid (Webster Online Dictionary)
Synergy: 1. the working together of two or more things to produce an effect greater than the sum of their individual effects (wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn) 2. Cooperative interaction among groups that creates an enhanced combined effect.
Systems: the human and material resources, organizational and administrative structures, policies, regulations and incentives, which facilitate an organized health promotion response to public health issues and challenges. (Nutbeam, WHO Collaborating Center for Health Promotion, 1998). All of the organizations, procedures, and resources contributing to planning, implementing, or evaluating policies and programs as part of community health improvement. (definition provided by MCW Institute Planning Committee)
Glossary developed by 30-member community-academic Institute Planning Committee.
Additional terms under discussion by the Institute Planning Committee include “equitable” and “power”.