Building Healthy Communities through Capacity Exchange

Dorsey T¹*, Abel Y¹

1. Abt Associates Inc, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Community building efforts in the U.S. often fall short of impacting issues at the root of poor community health because they tend to address only communities’ “symptomatic” health concerns, virtually ignore “community configuration” issues and perpetuate power relationships that are antithetical to promoting justice in marginalized communities. We introduce Capacity Exchange as a conceptual framework and, using real world examples, make a compelling case for why and how this will further various fields’ (philanthropy, evaluation, service delivery, policy) efforts toward community change.

The Capacity Exchange framework explicitly acknowledges that while improvements in individual and organizational capacity are critical to community change, individuals and individual organizations do not change communities alone. Communities – residents, organizations, and institutions that are actively relating to one another around common interests and objectives – change communities. Hence, the vision and values underlying this framework focus on how communities work, rather than how people and organizations can work in a community.

In practice, the Capacity Exchange framework dramatically alters our approach to community change by more effectively integrating the strategy, implementation, and assessment of our health improvement work. We will discuss how applying the framework can maximize returns on investment, improve overall community capacity, and increase social impact by:

• establishing priorities, goals and strategies that reflect community values and visions for health,
• implementing community-level change initiatives by structuring our work around functional community relationships, and
• assessing and measuring community-level change results that signal improvements in community health in a broader sense.