Emergence of third sector activism and community connectivity in Public Health

Public health (PH) practice should enable people and communities to increase their control over their own health and wellbeing. PH workers operate in complex cross-organisational ecologies that require engagement across public, private and voluntary sectors. They require leadership, foresight, negotiation, advocacy and brokerage skills to facilitate effective community connectivities.

The failure of traditional institutionalised public health delivery structures to sometimes meet particular needs in communities has encouraged the rise and continuing pace of community activism. Activism in contemporary societies (both high and low income) is increasingly associated with wider trends where individuals are themselves transforming traditional social structures through their choices of how to live differently in a constantly changing and uncertain world. A particularly pertinent example is grass roots activism associated with HIV/AIDS in both high- and low-income countries, encouraging awareness, behaviour change and condition management in specific risk communities. It is clear that grassroots activism of this type can signal significant public health ideas, often pre-empting and outpacing traditional public health responses. It may also signal a move away from viewing neighbourhoods/communities as passive recipients or objects of research by public health experts. Additionally, such processes thrive on network approaches to organising that point to the need for community engagement competences as part of workforce development education and training. There is scope for considering the inclusion of community/neighbourhood activists and volunteers to both participate in and formulate appropriate PH education and training learning platforms.

Sources or references

• Healthy Lives, Healthy People (White Paper)
• Healthy Lives, Healthy People: Towards a workforce strategy for the public health system
• Marmot Review: Fair Society, Healthy Lives
• Wanless Report: Securing good health for the whole population
• Welcoming Social Enterprise into Health and Social Care (2007) DoH London: HMSO.
• Liberating the NHS (2010). DoH Cmd 7881. London: HMSO.
• Grassroots Activism, Civil Society Mobilization, and the Politics of the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic (2011) Parker, R The Brown Journal of World Affairs 17 (2)
• Social Capital and waves of innovation in the risk society (2002) Jones, B & Miller, B: in Risk and Citizenship: Key Ideas in Welfare (Chapter 11) (eds) Rosalind Glover & Judith Glover, Routledge, London 2002
• Exceptional pressures will alter the face of the voluntary sector, says Recession Watch Panel (2009) Tristan Donovan in Third Sector accessed Aug 13 2012

Some of the information in this section is provided by stakeholders and expert groups, and does not necessarily represent the views of the CfWI.