Community Health Impact Assessment Workbook
This workbook is intended to guide grassroots and community oriented organisations through a series of exercises to create their own CHIA.
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This guide is for people who are looking to build a vision for health in their neighbourhoods and communities. This workbook is designed to help facilitators go through a process that combines lived experience, world-building, and determinants of health analysis. This helps map out potential partners and stakeholders for long term impacts to health in the face of change.
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A community health impact assessment is an approach to harnessing the knowledge held within communities around how systemic injustices create health outcomes. It provides a practical approach to ensuring that a justice-led and systems based approach to judge the potential health effects of a policy, strategy, plan, programme or project on a population, particularly on vulnerable or disadvantaged groups are considered.
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When a group of people are looking to have more representation and accountability to their lived experiences and conditions. This can be done as a field-building process that brings people together to form a vision and unite under a common banner. It can also be done when a large change is coming; such as a big brownfield regeneration project or even asking the question “what would the impacts of climate change be on our community?”.
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For successful facilitation of this process we highly recommend you complete the online learning programme called ‘Introduction to Ecological Health’. It will help you become more informed about health as it covers issues around the histories and uses of data, ethics, and science in health. This workbook then helps you go through a step-by-step process to produce your own health impact assessment that another person can complete and consider all the variable factors that make up people’s reality of their health in the places they live, work, and play.
This roots of this workbook are in our collaboration with Clean Air for Southall & Hayes. Since 2018 we have been working alongside the grassroots group in their efforts for health justice. This workbook is the result of a project we explored together when towards the end one person said “we should share this process with others like us, everyone should have this opportunity to advocate for their health in this way.” Please consider supporting all grassroots groups near you. They are the lifeblood of change.
You can read a peer-reviewed journal article on our journey and methodology here.
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Further Reading
