Advancing Health Equity through Authentic Community Engagement

As has been widely promoted, our mission at Aurrera Health Group is to advance access to affordable, comprehensive, high-quality health coverage and care – and we know that a focus on achieving health equity and reducing health inequities is essential to our work.To demonstrate our commitment to advancing equity, Aurrera Health Group is incorporating principles of authentic community engagement into our work with clients, and also organizationally. Centering the perspectives of people with lived experience is critical to the creation of sustainable policy and programmatic solutions in health care delivery.

Guiding Principles of Authentic Community Engagement

Authentic community engagement must be intentionally centered on people, families, and communities that are affected by the policymaking process. It requires a focus on building trusting relationships within and among communities before actively soliciting input and feedback and literally “meeting communities where they are.” Aurrera Health Group’s guiding principles for equity-centered and authentic community engagement include:

• Engaging with communities early, often, and throughout the process;

• Understanding and honoring strengths and assets that exist within communities;

• Removing barriers to participation by designing each session around the needs of the participants — choosing meeting times and locations that are accessible to participants, providing meals; assisting with childcare; providing support for transportation; and compensating people for their time;

• Respecting that people choose to participate in different ways and honor various levels of engagement;

• Using additional tools such as key informant interviews to ensure people can share their voice in a way that is meaningful for them;

• Recognizing how historical trauma, structural racism, and systemic bias have put certain communities at increased risk of poorer health outcomes;

• Dedicating resources to ensuring that we are engaging with communities in culturally meaningful ways;

• Being open, transparent, and responsive;

• Co-creating solutions with communities; and

• Following up with communities to let them know how their input was utilized.

Guiding Principles in Action

The Aurrera Health Group team is launching a new project, more details to come, that will leverage previous experience of Aurrera Health Group’s Jennifer Blanchard, Lisa Cariveau, and Vimbai Madzura.  In their previous role leading the Minnesota Department of Human Services’ Community and Care Integration team, Jennifer and Lisa developed a framework to include community engagement as a core component of an initiative focused on re-designing the state’s Medicaid case management system.In that effort, the team focused on communities, including American Indians, people from Black/African American, Asian/Asian American, and Latinx communities, and people living with disabilities and sought to understand their experiences with case management. The team built on existing community relationships to partner with trusted orga­nizations to design sessions across the state. The partners led efforts to invite attendees, and meetings were structured based upon the needs of each community.For example, when working with Tribal and Urban Indian communities, the team partnered with local Tribal leaders to utilize the Gathering of Native Americans (GONA) approach of planning and organization. The team also supported the Tribal Consultation process in Minnesota to honor Tribal sovereignty.This process, combined with a robust stakeholder engagement effort, allowed the team to incorporate the perspectives of people whose voices are often absent in policymaking and brought forward their experiences to inform policy design and decision-making.

A Commitment to Action!

We at Aurrera Health are committed to using an authentic community engagement approach to help achieve health equity and reduce health disparities and inequities by:

• Creating spaces to have honest dialogues, understand the experience and voices of people who have the most at stake, and focus the development of policy, programs, and services around those experiences;

• Partnering with local organizations to coordinate and structure conversations to best meet each community’s needs and utilize an equity lens to frame the work; and

• Pursuing and planning projects that address structural racism and center the voices of those most affected.

Stay tuned for updates on Aurrera Health Group’s community engagement work across the country.

Acknowledgements

The commitments and principles of this work is drawn from the expertise of others, including:AAMC and AMA - Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and ConceptsATSDR and CDC Principles of Community EngagementInternational Association of Public Participation (IAP2) Spectrum of Public Participation AdaptationMinnesota Department of Health - Principles of Authentic Community Engagement 

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Author

Vimbai Madzura [Deputy Director]