Listening to Community in a Tribal Health Improvement Process
Adrienne Ammerman
This is Adrienne Ammerman with WC Health Network and I’m talking with Lyndsey and Emily today about a project they’ve been working on together. So Lyndsey and Emily, let’s start with some introductions.
Emily Kujawa
I’m Emily Kujawa. I’m the project manager and improvement specialist at WC Health Network. And I do a variety of things, but I would say a big part of my role is focused on supporting organizations and groups in communities across the region to do collaborative planning, figure out how do we work together and do work together collaboratively in a way that’s really results focused, that’s data driven, that’s engaging the community and people who are most affected by the issues that these groups are working on together. And this means a lot of my day-to-day is meeting with people and organizations and groups across the region to co design meeting agendas, facilitate community listening sessions (which we’ll get to talk about today), design surveys offer technical assistance, to help build capacity within communities to do this kind of work on their own.
Adrienne Ammerman
What about you, Lyndsey?
Lyndsey Henderson
Hey, Lyndsey Henderson, I work for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Public Health and Human Services Division. My primary role is emergency preparedness. But another role of mine and something very dear to me, is facilitating the tribal health improvement process with the THIP planning team and the steering committee. I really love community health, so being part of this process is really fun and exciting for me.
Adrienne Ammerman
Awesome. Lyndsey, tell us some of the background about this project.
Lyndsey Henderson
So this was a grant with NACCHO, and we have to renew our tribal health improvement process. We paused for a while during COVID, and so this grant was really a great way to kind of get back in the swing of things, to collaborate with some of our partners and definitely the community.
Adrienne Ammerman
Tell us how you chose to do community listening sessions as part of this this project.
Lyndsey Henderson
Community voices, community experience, community knowledge, it’s all very powerful. And it’s really just a great way to enhance the way we understand and the way we address help in the community. So listening sessions provide a really great opportunity for that.
Adrienne Ammerman
What made your team decide to reach out to WNC Health Network for support?
Lyndsey Henderson
We have worked with the Health Network in the past for our tribal health improvement process, our tribal health assessment, and I know several other things. And we really love working with you guys because you are regional experts in community health. And like Emily was saying earlier, you are really great when it comes to planning and facilitation, and just any other technical support.
Adrienne Ammerman
What kind of support were you looking for, specifically?
Lyndsey Henderson
Initially, we weren’t sure other than we knew we wanted the Health Network to help us on this project. But as it turns out, Emily and her team, they were really great at helping make sense of my ideas. I had a lot of things going on up there! And Emily put me in the right direction of okay, this is what it sounds like you’re thinking what you want to do. You guys helped me develop material, especially the community listening session questions. I love those community listening session questions that that we created together! And Emily also helped facilitate lessons sessions, which was just a huge support to our team because the THIP planning team is is a small team.
Adrienne Ammerman
Great. Emily, tell us a little bit about how this partnership worked, and do you have anything to add about the support that you and the team provided?
Emily Kujawa
Just so much appreciation, Lyndsey, for you and your team and all the other work that you all do to support the tribal health improvement process. It’s really amazing and inspiring. Y’all have been able to keep it going and revive it, you know, in the middle of and post pandemic. I was so excited to get this request from all of you, I love working with y’all and really support this important process. I would say we met pretty regularly early on to try to get more clarity… there are so many possibilities for the direction that this project could have gone. And so it took a lot of thinking together and thinking about what are the opportunities for this project to also support where we’re at with the tribal health improvement planning process. So I think, yes, just a lot of getting clarity early on. And then as Lyndsey mentioned, just the co-designing the question guide… I also really love that guy.
Adrienne Ammerman
What do you love about it? I’m just hearing a lot of love for this question guide. What was it that sparked the love?!?
Lyndsey Henderson
A lot of material that we see is not tailored towards tribal communities. And so working with Emily, we really got to talk about well, what can what kinds of questions should we ask the community? And in the same sense, what kind of questions do we want to get? What kind of questions can we ask to get the best information? We really wanted these questions to be easy to understand, but also have very intentional answers. And just in the way we designed it, we talked a lot about our Cherokee culture, our Cherokee language, our Cherokee traditions, so it was really beautiful just to see that come together. Typically, in a lot of meetings, we have these icebreaker questions. And this was my favorite question just because I love it. But the question was, what are you proud of about your community or specifically EBCI? And so I think that was a great way for us just to open up. Start with something positive. And I think that really says a lot about the person and the community, in answering that question. It was just beautiful.
Adrienne Ammerman
Emily, how does this align with the health Network’s values and approach for how we work in the region?
Emily Kujawa
I feel like as an organization, we feel that it really matters how collaborative planning and process efforts, community engagement efforts happen, and there’s a lot of nuance within that how our team aims to embody certain values in in all of our partnerships and efforts. Meaningfully engaging community is a really core piece of that and I think that’s a big part for me of why this partnership with you, Lyndsey, and your team felt really well aligned… there is a commitment to really lifting up community voices and bringing them to a planning process. That matters. And so, to me, that felt like a huge piece of why this partnership was such a great aligned fit for us.
Adrienne Ammerman
Lyndsey, I’m curious, what’s next? How do you plan on using what you’ve learned so far?
Lyndsey Henderson
Emily and her team facilitated a consensus workshop to help summarize themes and key findings to basically answer the question what does health equity mean and what does it look like at EBCI, and that’s really important to us. And, for me, the way that I see this panning out is that it contributes to a shared community understanding firstly, and then we plan to incorporate those findings into our THIP teams as we develop strategies for our health priorities. So as we understand our community and health equity, we can also look towards what works best for our community in that way.
Adrienne Ammerman
Any words of wisdom for other local organizations or agencies that want to engage their communities in this way?
Lyndsey Henderson
One, I would say just, any time you have an opportunity to do a listening session or any other form of community engagement, absolutely do it. And what I really love about community listening sessions is that for us, storytelling is such a vital part of tradition. And two, it allows that face-to-face interaction. Listening sessions are a really nice way to take a step back from technology and the way we are used to gathering data. And to just to piggyback off of that, story data is just as important as number data, and sometimes, you know, offers a different lens to what we think we know. So I definitely just encourage communities or local health departments to look into community listening sessions and to really engage their community. It’s worth it.
Emily Kujawa
I totally resonate with that, Lyndsey. And one other thing I’ll add is, I think something I’ve learned with these listening sessions and other sessions I’ve supported over time is that the there’s a real opportunity with community listening sessions for them to be trust-building with community members. And so being really intentional and clear about: Who’s asking these questions? Who’s going to see this data? Who’s going to use this data? We will keep you in you know, if you want to continue to be involved with this process, we invite you to continue to be involved. Thinking about some of those nuances of the of the experience of people who participate in the listening session, and they present a real opportunity to build trust and deepen relationships with people in the community.
Adrienne Ammerman
Thank you so much, both of you, for sharing about this experience and for the work that you’re doing.
