Alberni Clayoquot Health Network is a community-driven mechanism that speaks with a collective voice on regional and local health issues; builds partnerships and capacity; shares concerns, ideas and resources; and creates innovative solutions that impact the social determinants of health and support sustainable healthy communities.
The Alberni Clayoquot Health Network is focused on bringing community voices forward as they apply a social determinants of health lens to municipal decision-making.
They have shifted mindsets and created space to think outside of the box with new partners by ensuring that community voices are at the centre to their direction. For this reason, the Network’s leadership table has the task of finding the resources to support those decisions.
In 2015, the network took on being more intentional about engaging with people living in poverty, to start, by articulating four action-oriented equity-building mechanisms:
In developing the Network’s poverty reduction action plan, they noted that most feedback received from the community was around racism and equity. For this reason they embedded a framework that was adopted from a Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) paper Equity in Sustainability: An Equity Scan of Local Government Sustainability Programs.
The USDN resource centres equity in four principles:
In the seven years since the Alberni Clayoquot Health Network prioritized this work, they are just starting to see their relationship-building efforts paying off. They have also developed a strong foundation of trust, and now have access to a wealth of diverse people and stories that can help educate decision-makers – particularly since decision-makers in the organizations the Network works with do not always reflect the diversity of the populations they serve.
The Network now sees several opportunities as they transition to a more active phase of their work: