Let's Talk: Community organizing

Building community power to address the structural and social determinants of health 

As understanding of the structural determinants of health deepens within the Canadian public health community, there is growing recognition that advancing health equity requires changing the written and unwritten rules that maintain patterns of inequities. To do that, public health can shift the balance of power by: 

• breaking the power of those protecting the status quo or making inequity worse 
• building the power of communities facing inequities and thus their ability to change the rules and how they are used  

Building community power through community organizing 

Although an effective and critical tool for building community power, community organizing and its benefits are not fully understood by public health agencies and practitioners. 

This Let’s Talk aims to develop public health’s understanding of community organizing as a strategy to advance health equity. It uses this description of community organizing:  

the processes by which people who have a common identity or purpose unite to build relationships, identify shared issues, collectively analyze those issues to understand structural injustices, develop collective goals based on that analysis, and implement strategies and tactics to reach those goals including: developing leadership skills, activating members for direct action and campaigning, expanding group membership, and building power among the group and broader community to influence decisions, set agendas, and shift worldviews (p. 2). 

The Let’s Talk also summarizes central concepts and tools in community organizing and shows how it differs from other change strategies used in public health. Further, it illustrates how community organizing contributes to improved health outcomes, and how public health and organizing groups can benefit from working together. 

Importantly, the problems community-organizing groups focus on are what public health calls the structural and social determinants of health. Because of this alignment and their focus on power building, community-organizing groups can be great partners for public health. 

Use this resource to

• Learn more about community organizing as an approach to address power imbalances and thereby influence the structural determinants of health and health equity 
• Develop an understanding of the central concepts in community organizing and the tools organizers use 
• Facilitate discussions about the benefits of partnering with community-organizing groups 

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