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Rooted in Faith
People of faith bring two unique and critical gifts to the movement to
eliminate health inequities
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Vision
Our faith traditions hold powerful truths about what it means to be whole and
healthy as individuals and communities. We have a vision of health that does
not settle for just the absence of disease, but that embraces abundance and the
opportunity to live out of ones highest spiritual capacity. People of faith
need to claim this vision and raise it as an important contribution to the work
of health justice.
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"Spirit power"
Spirit power is the sense of calling and conviction that comes from faith that
drives us toward and through work that seems beyond us. It is the belief that
we are empowered by a source of love and healing to reach farther than we could
on our own. It is the power that is inherent in the gathering of people who
share this calling and belief.
The Center operates out of an ethos that values the integrity of all religious
traditions and spiritual expressions. The Center’s approach will only be
enriched and strengthened as we integrate the language, symbols, and frameworks
of all those who live out a faith practice. One of the on-going learnings for
the staff, advisory council and executive board will be how to build our
competency to operate in an authentically interfaith way.
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Health is Loving Community
Community is our measured unit of health1
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Moving the needle on health inequities means we have to treat the community and
not just individuals in a community. This does not mean that we are not
concerned with the bodies, minds, and spirits of individuals. Clearly there is
such a thing as an individual and we want each distinct person in a community
to experience wholeness and health.
The aim of the Center is to tend to the wholeness of the community so that
individuals are healthy—they have the best possible physical well-being and the
ability to enjoy life, live out their highest spiritual capacity and contribute
positively to their family, community and society.2
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The role of health partners
Health care organizations are key partners in the work of the Center. They
bring important resources, services and knowledge. However, the Center’s
understanding of health may require some health care partners to stretch. The
medical model focuses almost exclusively on the individual. Even much community
health work continues to address the health of individuals in the community.
Health work happens in communities, but the community itself is often not the
focus of the initiatives. This gap may be addressed through the leadership
development work area of the Center.
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Driven by Community
The Center is committed to being a humble, authentic and learning partner with
communities.
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Defining community—Because communities have historically been defined by
outside forces for convenience or political or economic purposes, the Center
expects an identified community, whether geographic or defined by population,
to identify its own parameters.
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Valuing community capacity—The role of the Center in relation to communities is
as a partner that the community invites in and that serves the interests and
desired ends the community identifies. It means
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assuming that community members have the capacity to identify their own
questions and answers and that there are vital resources and assets already
present;
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sharing funding and control of resources with the community equitably;
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building trustworthy, long-term relationships that allow community members to
take leadership and ownership of projects;
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understanding that learning, transformation and growth is a mutual process and
that the work of the Center will be enriched by the communities with which it
partners;
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listening and active relationship building will be crucial to the Center’s
ability to join in the tables the community has already created or to bring
different voices to the table.
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Being clear about who we are, what we do and what our approach is, is necessary
to have an authentic relationship in the community. Both the community and the
Center need to be clear that there is a good match of perspective and approach
before entering into a partnership.
The Center recognizes the power of mobilizing relationships in community as a
key strategy for effecting change.
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Research points to the critical role that relationships play in personal
health. We are learning how experiences of love, hope, friendship, forgiveness,
supportive sharing, corporate prayer and religious practice actually impact our
bodies at the molecular scale. One of the unique resources that faith
communities bring is their wisdom and experience in living out these health
activities every day.
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How do we think strategically about the role and potential for mobilizing
relationships to impact social determinants? We are thinking beyond programs
here and thinking more about creating movements, sparking connections among
people and organizations, supporting the belief and trust in the efficacy of
relationships to bring change.
The Center embraces the conflict that arises in relationships that matter and
understands it as a critical part of the generative and transformative process.
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Systemic in Action
There is no way to form effective solutions to intractable problems without
seeing, understanding and unraveling the systems that have converged to support
and maintain them. Racism and the unfair distribution of wealth are the
fundamental systemic realities that are at heart of health injustice. For all
of its initiatives, the Center will ask how racism and poverty are at work and
integrate this analysis into its program design.
Clearly as we do this work, we will encounter significant power issues.
Affecting health in the way that we are talking about means challenging
political and economic structures. Many communities already actively engage at
this level, but the Center will have to be clear about what its capacity and
agenda is around policy and advocacy.
The three partner organizations of the Center all hold considerable power and
resources in communities. Each has strong vested interests that the
organizations will want to protect. The partner organizations may be named as
part of the systems of injustice that have impacted the community. There are
some actions or interventions that the Center will not be able to lead or
pursue because they will be counter to the positions of the partner
organizations or because of political constraints.
Transformation is a mutual process. It is not just the community that needs to
change. Certainly the collaborative partners will have to be honest,
non-defensive and as open as possible to hearing the experience and concerns of
the community and make systemic changes internally as vigorously as possible,
even as we live within the reality of the limitations of our organizations.
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Energized by Life-Causes
The Center will draw on approaches that help articulate and move an agenda of
life and hope. We are not simply against something—health disparities or
injustice. We are for life and for loving community—people living, loving and
working together to their greatest potential.
Gary Gunderson has identified five leading causes of life that are at the core
of what gives and sustains life in communities.
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Blessing—the way in which generations support, inform and influence each other.
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Coherence—how people make meaning out of their life experience.
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Agency—whether and how people feel like they have the capacity to act on their
own behalf and for others.
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Connection—the way in which we build and share relationships that are
constructive and fruitful.
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Hope—our ability to "remember the future," to project ourselves into the future
rooted in the faith we have because of our past.
The Center will incorporate these themes into our work.
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Collaborative
The Center itself is a collaborative enterprise and each partner
characteristically operates through collaboration. This value and experience
influences how we understand the nature of the work in community.
We understand that the work of eliminating health inequities—the work of
creating loving, just communities—is so ambitious that it cannot be
accomplished unless we intentionally seek out and draw in anyone who is willing
to work.
The Center works under the expectation that there is a shared investment in the
goal of eliminating health disparities in the community and that all partners
will bring forward their strongest assets and share them as freely as they are
able. This work does not belong to one group and cannot be solved by one
approach. No one philosophy of change holds the answer for how to create the
kind of loving, healthy communities to which we aspire. All those with a stake
in eliminating health disparities in the community will be invited to be at the
table.
We say this, understanding that people and organizations always have their own
self-interests and concerns and respecting the need of institutions to maintain
those interests. Organizations may be able to best participate in the
collaborative work if they are as clear as possible within their own membership
and with other partners about what they can bring to the table, what they
cannot and what their needs are in relation to the work. This also allows for
honest communication and clarity about what we actually have to work with as a
collaborative group.
1 Wendell Berry writes, "To be healthy is literally to be whole. Our
sense of wholeness is not just the completeness in ourselves but also is the
sense of belonging to others and to our place. I believe that the community—in
the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health
and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in
terms." Wendell Berry, "Health is Membership," in Another Turn of the Crank,
(Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995), 90.
2 Adapted from the Center for African American Health Status Report,
July 11, 2002
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