Purpose:

This Model Practices Framework provides strategies to identify and engage faith-based organizations (FBOs) as partners in community health promotion and disease prevention outreach. Designed for both public health and religious leaders, this guide aims to strengthen partnership-building capacity and enhance public health’s ability to reduce the spread of influenza.

Increasingly, public health agencies recognize the importance of working collaboratively with nontraditional partners. This guide contains a set of model practices commonly employed across a network of 10 diverse health, faith, and community-based organizations that reached large numbers of vulnerable, at-risk, hard-to-reach, and minority populations with influenza prevention services. These seasoned practitioners have worked with the Interfaith Health Program (IHP) at Emory University and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) to describe community-based practices that uniquely engage the social, structural, and leadership strengths of faith-based organizations.

Who is the Guide For?

If your work includes partnership building or community outreach in a public health agency or healthcare organization, you may already have collaborative relationships with faith-based organizations or you may want to build them. This guide is designed to assist you in strengthening existing relationships and ensure optimum success in building new ones.

If you are part of a faith-based organization that collaborates with public health and healthcare organizations, the guide is also designed to strengthen successful partnerships and to help you identify the unique capacities the faith community can contribute to achieving public health goals.

Because of the commitments of the leaders upon whose practices this guide is based, the resources in this guide should be of particular interest and value to those who want to build partnerships that break through cultural, trust, and resource barriers to achieve health equity.

How Can the Guide Be Used?

The Model Practices Framework is made up of 14 essential practices organized as “Foundation,” “Processes,” and “Infrastructure.” If you are developing community-based strategies to address a key health disparity, use these essential practices to assess capacity and plan collaborative action. Begin by recognizing that new partnership relationships and/or new capacities are necessary to overcome barriers to achieving health goals for particular populations.

Taking into account the priority health issue(s) to be addressed:

• Review the essential elements of the Model Practices Framework and determine which capacities could be instrumental in achieving progress. The five processes are the most useful starting point for this initial assessment.
  
  
• If these kinds of practices would likely improve efforts to address your community’s health challenges, the next step is to assess your current capacity for implementing these practices. Each of the practices has a definition and several indicators that describe how to recognize and/or build that capacity. Again, initially examining the five processes is likely your best starting point.
  
  
• Next, this assessment can be used to either build capacity for existing partnership relationships or identify additional partners; the assessment also provided the approaches to use for that relationship development.

• At this point, integrate the practices identified as “foundational” and “infrastructure” into planning for capacity building and new partner identification as needed.

• Insights about the best partners for these kinds of collaborations can be gained by reviewing the organizations that participated in the Model Practices Framework development and the case examples linked to the practices that describe “Who Are the Key Players?”  See “What Are FBOs?” for more information.

The next section provides information on FBOs, the religious landscape in the United States, and background on unique contributions FBOs can make to community health improvement efforts.