We’ve been asked to speak at a number of gatherings over the next few months. The invitations are music to our ears, partly because it signals interest in the potential of community agency as a way to improve health, and partly because it gives us the opportunity to experiment with how to package the message to different audiences.
Over the next few months, we’ll be speaking with people in health philanthropy, health insurance, rural health, and hospital care. All of them operate in different contexts so it’ll be an interesting challenge to see how to approach the idea of ‘community agency’ for each audience.
I’ve also been asked to interview the Chief Executive of England’s National Health Service (NHS), Simon Stevens. It’s at an event at which he’ll share his views on how redesigning local health and care services could improve communities’ health, wellbeing and independence. We don’t regularly share news about our work in the UK but we’ll be changing that over the coming months.
The Gatherings
To give you a sense of the demand out there, in this post I’m sharing information about the gatherings. Not all of them are fully worked up so I’m sharing what we know so far.
- Grantmakers in Health Annual Conference
- June 23rd, 2017, Boston, MA
- Organization: Grantmakers in Health
- Proposed Title or Description: Fostering the Agency of Communities to Improve Health
- Healthcare Leadership Forum
- June 23rd, 2017, Point Clear, AL
- Organization: Blue Cross Blue Shield Alabama
- Proposed Title or Description: Does the Social Really Determine?
- Engaged Leaders, Thriving Communities: 41st Annual Rural Hospital Leadership Conference
- June 28th, 2017, Chelan, WA
- Organization: Washington State Hospital Association
- Proposed Title or Description: How More Accountability is Key to the Shift to Value-Based Healthcare
- NCHA Summer Membership Meeting
- July 21st, 2017, Myrtle Beach, SC
- Organization: North Carolina Hospital Association (NHCA)
- Proposed Title or Description: Creating Health? Bridging the Gap between Health & Communities
- KHA Annual Convention and Trade Show
- September 7th, 2017, Wichita, KS
- Organization: Kansas Hospital Association (KHA)
- Proposed Title or Description: Twelve Principles Key to the Future of Health
- Festival of the Future City
- October 20th, 2017, Bristol, England
- Organization: Business West
- Proposed Title or Description: Interview of Simon Stevens, CEO of NHS England
I’m sure our sharp-eyed readers have noticed that we’re speaking twice on June 23rd, at two locations some 1400 miles apart. We’ve not turned a DeLorean DMC-12 into a time machine. I will be with the healthcare leaders in Point Clear, AL, and my Co-Founder, Bridget B Kelly, will be at Grantmakers in Health where she will be joined by panelists Andrew Binet of NextShift Collaborative, Eric Andrade of Voices for a Healthy SouthCoast and Ronel Remy of CityLife/Vida Urbana.
Other Stuff
While we’re on the road sharing what we’ve learned our new Chief Learning Officer, Maggie Hawthorne, will be making sense of the feedback from the symposium to help us decide our next steps. More on all of that soon, as well as the official launch of our new implementation tool for the 12 principles (it was shared with symposium participants and we’ll put it online in the next few weeks).
If you have a gathering at which you’d like us to share what we’ve learned about the importance of community agency to health, please do get in touch.
