Guiding PrinciplE 5
Strengthening partner and community capacity
Strengthening partner and community capacity supports the sustainability of current and future projects.
Introduction
Focusing resources to better understand and meet community needs
All communities possess a wide range of assets and strengths, which can be leveraged to overcome challenges and improve collective health and well-being. When engaging with organizational partners and other collaborators in your work, take stock of the unique perspectives that each group brings to the table and seek opportunities for mutual capacity building. Opportunities for shared learning and growth can take on many different forms – from offering formal training and funding opportunities to sharing communications materials and project how-to guides, to expanding mutual understanding of cultural experiences. Speak openly with your partners about their strengths and desired areas for growth, and tailor your capacity-building partnership accordingly.
Health equity projects provide opportunities to build capacity and power among members of your community. Often, these capacity-building opportunities led to new relationships and a deeper understanding of community needs that could be leveraged for future community-driven health equity work.
Advancing health equity video series guiding principle 5: Strengthening partner and community capacity supports the sustainability of current and future projects. Watch more community stories.
Discover Three Strategies Below
Dive into a slice of Guiding Principle 5 below from our Community Guide to Advance Health Equity. Explore across the 3 strategies of Guiding Principle 5 to discover how to strengthen partner and community capacity. Learn more and see additional stories and examples in the full Guiding Principle 5. To learn more about how to sustain projects by boosting partner capacity, explore snapshots of the 3 strategies below.
Strategy 1: Provide partners with needed resources and new skills
Like you, your partners hold deep knowledge about how to meaningfully advance health equity in their communities. Capacity building is not about “fixing weaknesses” – rather, it is about leveraging existing strengths for continued growth. Opportunities for capacity building are likely to arise many times over the life course of your projects and partnerships. While some opportunities may present themselves as formal requests for resources or training, others may arise more organically as you and your partners learn more about one another’s strengths, assets, and needs.
We know there will never be enough dollars or staff to lead us to the structural change that is required… we need people power, and we need to sustain those relationships.
Project Echo Participant
Work with your partners to assess their existing capacity and opportunities for growth.
Keep in mind that capacity building is not a one-way street: sharing your organization’s strengths, needs, and capacity-building goals in return can help foster trust, collaboration, and mutual growth. While capacity-building opportunities will naturally arise throughout the course of your partnerships, it may be beneficial to develop shared goals, objectives, and group agreements in advance so that you are ready to capitalize on opportunities when they arise.
Use train-the-trainer approaches to build capacity and expand reach.
Providing your partners with formal training and learning opportunities that they can then offer to their staff ensures that your organization’s knowledge and resources reach as wide an audience as possible. To the extent possible, adapt your training approach and materials to your partners’ needs and preferences.
Create unbranded materials that your partners can adapt to their own work.
As you develop materials for use in your work, reflect on whether they may also be beneficial to your partners and the communities they serve. Consider the feasibility of creating unbranded materials to which your partners can add their organizational logos and other culturally relevant images and symbols. This can increase the resonance and acceptance of materials in the communities your partners serve, enable your partner to devote time and resources to other activities, and expand the reach of your organization’s work.
Create peer-to-peer learning spaces and other opportunities to share successes, challenges, and lessons learned.
Creating spaces where you and your partners can discuss your experiences – including achievements, barriers, and opportunities for improvement – can be a powerful capacity-building tool. By sharing your experiences, you can build one another’s capacity to address challenges in real time and manage similar issues in the future.
a presentation on funding strategies to support tribal organizations.
Implementation ideas
Keep in mind
Prioritize capacity-building needs.
Grant timelines are often limited, and your partners may have more capacity-building needs than you have time to address. Talk with your partners about their priorities and collectively determine what is realistic to accomplish within your timeline.
Adapt throughout your partnership.
There are many reasons why you and your partners’ capacity-building needs may change over time—internal organizational changes, shifts in external social, economic, or political environments, new funder requirements, and more. Check in with one another routinely and, to the extent possible, adjust your capacity-building partnership accordingly.
Project Partner Example
ITCM designed a social media toolkit, which includes ready-to-use social media posts and graphics, suggested hashtags, and PSAs for tribes and tribal organizations working to promote COVID-19 vaccination in their communities.
Reflections
How do the needs and capacity of partner organizations differ from the needs and capacity of your own organization? How can you meet your partners where they are?
Strategy 2:
Adapt project requirements and activities to partner needs
At times, your organization may provide funding to your community partners or other community-based groups. In these situations, consider how you may be able to adapt financial and programmatic grant requirements to your partners’ existing capacity. This may include offering flexible funds and grants of varying sizes as well as “right-sizing” grant requirements so that they do not place undue burden on applicants or awardees. There may be other times when you cannot substantially adjust grant requirements, such as when you provide subawards subject to the original funding source’s rules and regulations. Under these circumstances, consider providing or connecting your partners with the technical assistance services they need to successfully meet the grant requirements. By meeting your partners where they are while also offering opportunities for growth, you can enhance the success and sustainability of current and future projects.
Not all CBOs have the capacity to manage that much money. Breaking down funding into smaller chunks actually expands access to smaller organizations. [It’s] a really nice way of meeting people where they are.
ITCM
Implementation ideas
Offer grants of varying sizes and flexible funding.
While larger grants provide organizations with more resources for their work, smaller organizations may not have the infrastructure or capacity needed to manage large amounts of money. Offering grants of varying sizes can increase the accessibility of funding opportunities for smaller, grassroots organizations. Providing flexible or unrestricted funding is another strategy for building awardees’ organizational capacity. Flexible funds allow organizations to allocate resources where they are needed most, develop and pilot innovative approaches to meeting their communities’ needs, and quickly adapt to changing circumstances.
Ensure that application, reporting, and evaluation requirements are low burden and efficient
By designing low burden grant requirements, you can help ensure that organizations are able to devote as much time as possible to their programmatic work. To the extent possible, try to limit requests for information on grant applications and reports only to what is necessary, and consider ways to streamline reporting by completing documentation together in regular meetings.
Provide technical assistance to ensure that partners can successfully meet project requirements
Technical assistance may help partners to address areas where needs do not completely align, and can cover any number of topics such as grant-writing, budgeting and financial management, program development and implementation, human participant protection guidelines, or evaluation. Work closely with your partners to identify their specific technical assistance needs and goals as well as their preferences for delivery format (e.g., in-person vs. web-based, one-on-one vs. group setting) and frequency.
Collectively decide on strategies for overcoming disagreements, repairing harm, and rebuilding trust.
As a group, collectively decide on potential strategies for working through disagreements, repairing any harm , and rebuilding trust. Keep in mind that preferred strategies are likely to differ across cultures and individuals. You can explore various approaches until you find the best fit for your coalition.
Create mechanisms for feedback and ongoing improvement of project requirements.
Ensure that all requirements and expectations are clearly communicated, create explicit mechanisms for feedback (e.g., surveys, virtual suggestion boxes, individual or group discussions), and be as responsive as possible to your partners’ challenges and suggestions for improvement. If you are not able to adapt project requirements in response to partner feedback, be transparent about your reasoning and offer other solutions.
Funding requirements may prevent you from fully adapting project requirements to your partners’ needs:
When possible, speak to your funders about your partners’ specific needs and discuss alternate options for ensuring their success.
Be mindful of power dynamics:
Providing subawards or other grants to your partners can change existing power dynamics. Be mindful of these shifts, acknowledge them openly, and collaboratively identify opportunities to address imbalances that are negatively impacting your work. Keep in mind that power sharing is not a one-time action, but rather an ongoing commitment to equitable partnership and collaboration.
Keep in mind
Project Partner Example
During the first year of the Vaccine Equity Project, PHS released a request for proposals (RFP) to identify CBOs interested in participating in a train-the-trainer program through which organizations serving pregnant people would train their community-facing staff to be trusted messengers of COVID-19 vaccine-related information. In response to feedback from potential applicants that the RFP process was burdensome for smaller CBOs with less administrative capacity, PHS switched to a request for information (RFI) format during the second year of the Vaccine Equity Project. The RFI, which included a brief checklist and short form questions, reduced the administrative burden on applicants while still providing PHS with the information they needed to evaluate each application.
Reflection Questions
How do your partners’ organizational infrastructure and capacity differ from your own? What barriers might they encounter when applying for, or reporting on, a grant? What steps can you take to minimize these burdens? What steps could you take to bolster capacity to engage in accurate and timely reporting from subawardees?
Strategy 3:
Develop project materials and resources that address health literacy more broadly
Vaccine Equity Project partners saw the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to promote community dialogue around broader issues of health literacy and barriers to navigating the health care system. Project partners knew that the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on their communities was directly tied to historical and ongoing racism and other systems of oppression. Project partners focused community capacity-building efforts on increasing health literacy and improving knowledge of how to access healthcare. These efforts were intended to leverage existing community assets to improve collective health and wellbeing, not to absolve institutions of their responsibility to create more equitable policies and practices.
We don’t want to go into a community and build trust just for the purpose of giving vaccines. It is moving beyond that to help them understand how to better navigate the healthcare system.
Project HEALINGS
Implementation ideas
Expand project-specific communications materials to include information about other health issues in your community.
Vaccine Equity Project partners discovered multiple benefits to integrating information about community-identified health concerns into their COVID-19-related communications materials. Notably, it enabled Project partners to provide important information about health issues receiving less attention from the broader public health system due to the demands of the COVID-19 response; to highlight the connections between COVID-19 and other health issues; and to mitigate pandemic fatigue.
Integrate project activities into broader community health fairs.
Community health fairs reduce common barriers to healthcare access, such as cost, transportation, and time, by offering free or low-cost health services in widely used community settings like religious institutions, recreation centers, shopping centers, and schools. Beyond enabling Project partners to reach their vaccination goals, health fairs connected community members with important information, services, and resources designed to improve their health literacy and build their capacity to navigate the healthcare system.
Partner with community health workers (CHWs).
As members of the communities they serve, CHWs are uniquely positioned to provide culturally and linguistically responsive services. Because CHWs (called promotores in some communities) take a holistic approach to community health – addressing the social determinants of health alongside specific health concerns – they can help situate your project’s activities within a broader context and provide community members with information and resources that will last beyond the project period.
Engage community members in the development, implementation, and evaluation of your project.
Bringing community members together for a specific project can broaden social networks, increase access to information and other resources, and provide important skill-building opportunities. Over time, these actions can help build community power and shift decision-making processes into the hands of those most impacted by health inequities.
Keep health equity at the center of health literacy efforts:
While building community health literacy and capacity to navigate the healthcare system is critical, responsibility should not lie with community members to adapt to inequitable systems. Consider how you can support systems-level changes, such as organizational health literacy policies and practices, that advance health equity.
Use an asset-based approach to community capacity building:
All communities are rich in human, social, physical, and other resources that can be mobilized to build capacity.
Keep in mind
Project Partner Example
Project HEALINGS wrote an article (one in a series of six articles overall), “Vaccination Empowers Learning About Overall Health and Wellness,” which discusses vaccination as a tool individuals can use to take control of their health. The article was published in 8 different languages.
Reflection questions
How do you currently involve community members in the development, implementation, and evaluation of your projects? How could you bring community partners to the table at the design phase of programming and planning?