A Community Leaders Health Impact Assessment Workbook
This workbook is a light-touch assessment document whereby community leaders help define the criteria and methods through which their people’s health is impacted by a potential plan, policy, or project.
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This guide is for people who work in-between authorities and communities. It is for people who are able to convene community leaders based on existing relationships and work together in their best interests. It is for people who are able to take the outcomes of this guide and take it upstream to people who need to see it urgently.
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A community leaders HIA is a rapid-fire 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 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 large policy, project, or change is due to occur in an area and decision makers need to ensure they minimise the conditions that impact health.
NOTE: This guide is intended as the first of two steps. For the real impact of this work we advise the use of the CHIA toolkit, which is a process that involves members of the public and wider stakeholders.
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This guide is designed to support organisers and staff to facilitate one or two workshops. Facilitators should read the guide - and any additional reading - and prepare to host a session with community leaders. These leaders should be people who hold trusted leadership from the community they represent who have consent to communicate key insights on their behalf. By gathering these leaders together it’s possible to produce a rapid-fire health impact assessment that is based on the lived experiences of people most affected by the status quo.
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.
To access the workbook please fill in the form below
WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU
If you download the workbook we’d love to hear from you about your experiences. We can also offer advice and support.
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Further Reading
