Using Internet-based Tools to Promote Community Health and Development

1. Using Internet-based Tools to Promote Community Health and Development

2. What do we mean by using internet-based tools to promote community health and development? • To learn how to do the work. • To gather information. • To communicate with others. • To distribute educational or other information to participants. • To conduct business. • To engage in advocacy.

3. Why use internet-based tools to promote community health and development? • Give access to knowledge and information to everyone. • Make it possible for people to change their lives and communities themselves. • Help to distribute power and control more equitably throughout societies.

4. Why use internet-based tools to promote community health and development? • Help to combat ignorance and misinformation (as well as disinformation—the intentional lies governments, corporations, institutions and other entities sometimes tell in order to keep control or to protect their own self-interest). • Make it easier for people to understand how they can effect social change, and therefore be more willing to attempt it.

5. Why use internet-based tools to promote community health and development? • Give people models to follow. • Put people concerned with health and community development in touch with one another. • Increase the ease and effectiveness of advocacy, particularly for those who might otherwise have no voice. • Can ease access to elected and appointed officials. • Help to assure accountability of those officials and oversight bodies. • Encourage and facilitate collaboration among individuals and organizations at all levels. • Can shorten response time to community needs.

6. Who should use internet-based tools to promote community health and development? • Professionals and professional organizations. • Grassroots and community-based organizations. • Larger nonprofits and initiatives. • Community activists. • Participants in and beneficiaries of health and community service organizations and initiatives. • Students in disciplines related to health and community services.

7. When should you use internet-based tools to promote community health and development? • To build the community’s capacity to solve its own problems. • Starting a program, initiative, or other effort with little information. • Need to communicate with a large number of people (and decide to embark on an action) quickly. • To learn about or understand laws or regulation. • Need information for a grant proposal or other funding possibility. • What to get message out, or set up a place where everyone involved in the organization, effort, or issue can communicate.

8. The Logic Behind the Community Tool Box as an Internet-based Tool for Promotion of Health and Community Development

9. Guiding Principles: • An organization’s vision, mission, and philosophy should all be consistent with one another. • Almost any effort will benefit from a participatory process. • Ethics are important.

10. Components of Health and Community Development: Understanding the context of the work and collaborative planning: • Creating and maintaining coalitions. • Analyzing community-identified problems and goals. • Developing a framework or model of change. • Developing strategic and actions plans. • Building leadership. Community action and intervention: • Developing an intervention. • Increasing participation and membership. • Enhancing cultural competency. Widespread behavior change and improvement in population-level outcomes: • Implementing a social marketing campaign.

11. Components of Health and Community Development: Sustaining the effort: • Writing a grant application for funding. • Improving organizational management and development. • Sustaining the work or initiative.