Engaging the Community in Decision Making

In 2004, seven community partnerships with strong track records engaging a broad range of community members in their work were selected to participate in the Pathways to Collaboration Workgroup funded by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and organized by the Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health at The New York Academy of Medicine.

The Workgroup’s goal was to document exactly what the partnerships were doing to promote meaningful community engagement and to understand and share how they were doing it so that they and other interested partnerships could strengthen their work.

Roz D. Lasker, MD, Director of the Center for the Advancement of Collaborative Strategies in Health and John A. Guidry, a political scientist from Brooklyn, conducted research on the methods, cases, findings, and practical tools. As a result the book Engaging the Community in Decision Making: Case Studies Tracking Participation, Voice, and Influence, was published and is now available.

The book summarizes how five community partnerships, working with a team of researchers, tracks the ideas of everyone involved and reveals how and why the ideas of marginalized and ordinary residents were far less likely to be influential than those of people with more clout, resources, or acknowledged expertise. The authors also explain how and why these influence inequities can be overcome, providing readers with practical, evidence-based tools to help them do so.