Community Organizing for Health Care: An Analysis of the Process (original) (raw)

2013, Journal of Community Practice

This article examines the community organizing process for better health services for disenfranchised populations that cannot afford medical care in an affluent community. In response, concerned citizens and voluntary organizations have attempted to organize to transform policies and to implement new healthcare services. The author adopts a researcher participant role and examines the organizing process by studying six nonprofit agencies, one public health office, and shadowing the community organizer. The paper concludes that community organizing can be an especially challenging process when strategies are misaligned, stakeholders are dissentaneous, the public is apathetic to needs of low-income people, and solutions are diverse. KEYWORDS Community organizing, nonprofit health services, grounded theory An increased focus on health practices and health care provisions stems from the development of strategies to foster healthy work environments, efforts to facilitate citizen participation in health programs (Minkler, 1990; Wallerstein, 1992), and health care promotion models focusing on communitywide collaborations. In the United States, local governments, in collaboration with private health care agencies, provide public health services. Although the I thank the three anonymous reviewers whose suggestions and recommendations strengthened and improved my article.