We’re pleased to announce that registration for our inaugural symposium is now open. You can read more about the symposium on our (new) website or our Eventbrite page. Please get in touch if you’d like to know more.
The Case Studies
While we’ve been finalizing the registration process we’ve also been recruiting speakers. You’ll recall that in my last post I mentioned two case studies and six breakouts. I’m pleased to announce that the case studies will be:
- Building Healthy Communities by The California Endowment
- Healthy Buildings Program by the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative
Both case studies will be represented through four perspectives: implementation, finance, evaluation, and local residents. We want to walk the talk of health not just being the purview of the health system, which is why we want to hear from local residents. Building on that, we want to hear how evaluators in the above work are assessing ‘health’ beyond biological measures. And, given that health is currently funded based on disease, we want to understand how a broader understanding of health is – or might be – funded.
The Breakouts
For the breakouts we decided to recruit subject matter experts as Editorial Partners. We’ve recruited four so far; they are:
- Active Living by Design who’ll run a breakout called ‘Creating Leadership Capacity for Long-term Change’
- UnitedHealthcare who’ll run a breakout called ‘Connecting Federal to Local’
- Business Innovation Factory who’ll run a breakout called ’Discovering Business Models’
- And Hershey Cause Communications who’ll run a breakout called ’Communicating the Value of Partnerships’
We’re working on the precise content of each breakout with the Partners (and so the titles might change) and also on recruiting the two final Partners. Over the coming weeks we’ll also be posting interviews of them so you can better understand what they do and what they’ll cover in their sessions.
Plenaries
We’re tired of meetings at which plenary speakers show off about their work. Our plenary speakers will be focusing on our collective failures.
David Chavis of Community Science, Jim Hester of Population Health Systems, and Phil Thompson of MIT will discuss why, despite widespread acknowledgement that health is ‘more than just the absence of disease’ and that focusing on risk factors is not enough, we have made so little progress. They’ll be bringing the perspectives of evaluation, finance, and local communities, respectively.
Carl Baty of Rounding the Bases and Len Syme of the University of California Berkeley will take it a step further and discuss failure outright. How has the health system’s reasoning been flawed and how has that left communities unsupported? And they’ll be considering whether we need to ‘heal’ before we can even start thinking about health.
Logistics
Registration is open and the logistical details are:
- May 15-16, 2017
- Oakland Marriott City Center, 1001 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94607
- Registration is US$1000, excluding travel and accommodation
We have a small number of rooms available at the Marriott at the ‘government rate’. You’ll get the room booking information in the email that confirms your registration. We strongly advise you to snap these rooms up while you can.
Oh, and…
…we’ve given the symposium a new name: Community Agency & Health.
It was called ‘Bridging Health & Community’ but we liked that so much that we decided to use it for our new organization (hence the new website). We’ll tell you more about that soon.
Please do get in touch if you’d like to know more about the symposium.
