Community-based public health: lessons on power, policy and grassroots leadership.

This first issue was co-authored by two representatives of the many kinds of people and organizations involved in CBPH. Wendel Brunner, PhD, MD, Director of Public Health for Contra Costa Health Services (CCHS), and Barbara Becnel, director of the West County Health Collaborative, were invited to write the first brief because as part of the PPH grantee network in Contra Costa County, they both represent organizations that are part of our statewide initiative to support effective partnerships between local health departments and community groups. Our third contributor, Joan Ryan, originally wrote her column for publication in the San Francisco Chronicle. The collaboration Ryan describes, between CCHS and several community groups, actually began several years before PPH. We include it here because it shows the actual impact of combining the strengths and resources of a local health department with those of community residents. The Partnership for the Public’s Health believes that C B P H improves the physical, social, and economic conditions of a community through community empowerment and collaboration with health departments and with other public and private agencies and institutions. CBPH is the set of strategies and actions that re-focus the practice of public health toward s and with the community. Public health departments, the principal set of government entities with the mission to protect and improve the health of the community, become more effective at accomplishing mandated functions when communities are true partners in these endeavors. In the PPH Initiative as a whole, and in this series of policy briefs, we emphasize the definition of community that describes a geographic location, because we know that change in a community has the best chance of being sustained if it is initiated and owned by the residents who live there. PPH chose local public health departments as the partnering agencies with communities because, although they may not be the o n l y i n s t i t utions with a responsibility for improved community health, they are the principal ones. They can provide access and entrée to bring other institutional partners to the collaborative table that represents the larger public health system. We welcome you to our first issue of Community-Based Public Health: Policy and Practice, and we hope that you will be provoked, delighted and inspired by these stories. T he Partnership for the Public’s Health (PPH), a collaboration of The California Endowment and the Public Health Institute, is publishing a series of policy briefs on the various components of CommunityBased Public Health (CBPH) and associated issues. As early as 1988, the Institute of Medicine noted that public health should be “what we as a society do collectively to assure the conditions in which people can be healthy.” 1 That collective approach drives the PPH Initiative.