A Guide to Community Engagement Frameworks For Action on the Social Determinants of Health and Health Equity

"Emerging research is demonstrating how community engagement can contribute to improved health outcomes, better financial performance and strengthened community identity. While the case for community engagement is being established, the actual practice remains unclear and even intimidating to many public health practitioners."

This document from Canada's National Collaborating Centre for Determinants of Health (NCCDH) is intended as a reference guide for public health practitioners who need support in adopting or revising a community engagement strategy with health equity and social determinants of health (SDH) components.

Community engagement can be described as the participation of members of a community in assessing, planning, implementing, and evaluating solutions to problems that affect them. A community engagement framework is a written document that supports and guides community engagement initiatives, including both theoretical/conceptual and practical, "how-to" components. That said, community engagement works best when it is responsive to the needs of the community; no document can establish what the most strategic combination of activities is for any given context. The emphasis should be on the specific project rather than on the framework that guides it.

NCCDH invites practitioners to use this resource to:

• learn about existing community engagement frameworks, as well as their strategies and approaches;
• determine whether they need to create a new, context-specific community engagement framework to support their work, or adopt an existing framework;
• match their project to an appropriate community engagement framework; and
• revise a community engagement strategy they are currently using.

The main section of this document lists the 16 frameworks identified through the authors' search and analysis. All are applicable to general Canadian public health initiatives with the exception of the first two, which are more focused thematically but have strong health equity and SDH components. In addition to a link to their online location, a summary is provided of each document, which is designed to help readers identify the most relevant and useful frameworks for their organisation or project. Each framework is described under the following headings: 1) area of focus, 2) relevance to the SDH and health equity, 3) intended use, 4) principles and values, 5) community engagement strategies, 6) risks, 7) success factors, and 8) evaluation.

The included frameworks represent the spectrum to which health equity and the SDH are emphasised. The question is how explicitly is this link made and to what degree is it necessary to modify to ensure that values and perspectives of equity and social justice are reflected in the strategies used.