IHP, in partnership with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), has published a resource guide and toolkit, Public Health and Faith Community Partnerships:  Model Practices to Increase Influenza Prevention Among Hard to Reach Populations.

The Model Practices Framework provides strategies to identify and engage faith-based organizations as partners in community health promotion and disease prevention outreach. Designed for both public health and religious leaders, the aims of the guide are to contribute to partnership-building capacity and to enhance the ability of public health to reduce the spread of influenza.

Increasingly, public health agencies recognize the importance of working collaboratively with non-traditional partners. The guide contains a set of model practices commonly employed across a network of ten 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 IHP and ASTHO to describe community-based practices that uniquely engage the social structural and leadership strengths of faith-based organizations.

For those whose work includes partnership building or community outreach in a public health agency or health care organization, the guide is designed to assist in strengthening  collaborative relationships with faith-based organizations and to ensure optimum success in building new ones. For those who work as part of a faith-based organization that collaborates with public health and health care organizations, the guide is designed to strengthen successful partnerships and to help identify the unique capacities the faith community can contribute to achieving public health goals.