Community Health Assessment (CHA) Workshops

iikd-group-seneca Our signature Community Health Assessment Workshops (CHAW) are designed to increase the capacity of tribal communities and American Indian-serving organizations to pro-actively identify the factors that impact the health of their communities and to develop and implement sustainable health planning efforts informed by a community health assessment (CHA). CHA is a customary practice and a core function of public health and is defined as a systematic process of collecting and analyzing health data.

CHAs can:

Inform community decision-making, drive prevention initiatives, and identify priority health concerns;
Be used to educate and mobilize communities;
Help garner resources by organizing baseline data for grant and funding proposals; and
Establish accountability to ensure measurable health improvement.

Indigenous Community Health Assessment

IIKD has hosted many workshops with Tribes, Pueblos, Nations, and off-reservation urban Native communities across the US and has developed a unique approach to Indigenous CHA. Our model of culturally-centered CHA supports Tribal/community self-determination by presenting participants with a broad introduction to the diversity of CHA models, skills and tools and allows participants to design Action Plans that are responsive to local change, integrates cultural core values, builds on community strengths and assets, and engages tribal leaders and community members as partners in health. To further our team-based approach to CHA, we encourage workshop participants to register as team of 2-3 individuals to build inter-/intra-tribal partnership and aid in the long-term sustainability of CHA.

Participatory Learning

Our workshops are semi-structured learning experiences that involve a variety of instructional methods that are interactive and experiential, such as role-play exercises, facilitated discussion, lectures, demonstrations, panel discussions, and action planning. This approach provides a structure for clear dialogue and reflection, engages the participation of each team member, and maximizes involvement to develop actionable strategies and timelines. Participatory learning techniques also encourage participants to teach others by sharing their diverse perspectives and experiences to highlight Indigenous Best Practices.

Core Instruction Areas

Increasing knowledge about CHA such as developing a broad understanding of prevailing models for CHA
Building skills for conducting CHA such as survey design, simple statistical analysis, and focus group facilitation
Boosting abilities and increasing efficacy among participants by providing hands-on demonstrations and engaging teams in action planning
Reinforcement of Indigenous cultural core values such as integrating language into CHA, engaging tribal and traditional community leaders, and identifying shared visions of health and well-being

For more information about our signature CHA Workshops or other CHA-related initiatives, contact Nathania Tsosie at nttsosie@unm.edu or 505.925.4377.