How looking underneath buzz terms like ‘deaths of despair’ and ‘asset-based community development’ is key to finding solutions

A conversation with Graham Duncan about building confidence and hope amongst marginalised populations – and the psychological processes underpinning it

How co-production, self-management and health promotion all have the potential to increase social inequity, and what you can do about it

A conversation with Lauren Weinstein about how power differences are intrinsically present in co-production and what she’s doing to overcome them

How atomising problems and providing programmes ignores what really matters in enabling people to turn their lives around

A conversation with Maff Potts on how 20 years working at the sharp end of society has taught it him that only two things matter, and what he’s doing about it

How cross-sector partnering demands thinking about place, and why thinking about place means thinking about people’s choices and freedom

A conversation with David Relph, formerly of Bristol Health Partners, on why collaboration has to be the core purpose of institutions concerned with health

How our failure to effectively respond to non-communicable diseases may be because our science needs updating – if only our politics would get out of the way

A conversation with Toby Lowe on his journey from baffled Chief Executive to a key figure in the movement to find more effective ways to work in complex social environments

How eliciting social definitions of value may make emerging partnerships between health care and CBOs more effective

A conversation with Andrew Harrison of Revaluation and The Learning Studio on the promise and complexity of surfacing new types of value

How other sectors are learning that the key to responding to social circumstances is deeper relationships with the citizens they serve

How I struggle to get my urbanista head around the size of the challenge

Paul Taylor, Innovation Coach at Bromford, a housing association in the UK, describes why building homes is not enough

How a flawed idea got traction and what you can do to fight back

Despite the ray of hope (yes, hope) that sits in Brexit

Three articles have reminded me that the core challenge to bridging health and community is healthcare-centricity

Some reflections on what it was like to take a whole month off work

How 12 days of easy living in the Brazil sunshine has turned me into a porky

A cheerful thought for the new year but one that I am increasingly coming round to as I converse with friends

In this post, we share the findings of our research into what it will take for public health to embrace community power building as a strategy

In this ‘final’ post, I share some of the reasons why we failed to get funders to support us; some are about how we worked, some are about funders, and some are about the wider culture in the UK

A little update on where we’ve got to in trying to get our work off the ground and what it’s teaching us about funders

Announcing our December 4th webinar at which we’ll share our findings into what it’ll take for public health to adopt strategies that strengthen a community’s collective ability to improve population health

How the leader of Glasgow Council seems to have failed to understand the lived realities of thousands of council workers

In part five of this five-part series, I share how we intend to keep learning from courageous practitioners while building a learning environment for those that want to follow

In part four of this five-part series, I share how we tried to make the Principles into a product and find a market, and what we learned through the process

How the folks at Kokua Kalihi Valley Comprehensive Family Services in Hawaii bake intentionality into their every day practice, and how I struggled with it

How writing about one’s work likely means criticising systems —a risky strategy given that they’re often the source of funding

In part three of this five-part series, I share how I learned that the 12 Principles are about control – a way to foster it amongst communities and enable health care to share it

Some reflections as I head back from an eight-day holiday on the Greek Island of Amorgos

In part two of this five-part series, I share how my search for a new dialog led to ‘discovering’ social capital and made me want to ‘de-fluff’ community-building work

How research and medical journals further the disconnect between health care systems and the people they purport to serve

In part one of this five-part series, I share the three biases that I think health care has and how they prevent us from having a proper conversation about the future of health

The need to share experiential knowledge and applaud one former CEO for doing that through 'six tensions'

My UK speaking agent, Maria Franzoni interviewed me for her podcast, 'Speaking Business'

Announcing our webinar hosted by the Root Cause Coalition on how to truly engage your community and the re-issue of our eBook, 'Communities Creating Health'

How sharing knowledge from work based on parity between systems and people is likely more expensive than sharing knowledge from formal academia

Announcing the second version of our implementation tool, including some photographs of the previous version in use and how that informed the new version

How you keep the energy up in volunteer-reliant work

My tweets on the final (the tournament deserved better)

My thoughts on the two finalists, including all of my tweets on the games that they played

My tweets on the teams and the games, as well as a tweet on the play-off for third place

My tweets on the teams and the games

My tweets on the teams and the games

How completing grant application forms is an art all its own

My tweets on the teams and the games

How in 'social innovation', it seems that only the privileged can play

How ultimately you might need to accept that you’re part of the extractive forces acting on communities, while working out how to leverage your privilege for others

Whether foundations truly understand the importance of content and editorial strategy as a way to grow a field of practice

How the Democracy Collaborative is denting the universe, proving themselves to be way more important than most other think tanks

Some words of support from Ewan Aitken of Cyrenians, an Edinburgh-based charity that for 50 years has served the homeless and vulnerable transform their lives by helping them believe that they can

Because we’re not a proper company, never want to be, and think we need to separate the needs of the work from the needs of an organization

Whether broadening the issues facing health care beyond the limitations of the bio-medical model has, in fact, taken the edge off our work

Like economic insecurity and being denied access to clubs

Announcing the developing of our concept note, which we intend to send to funders to gauge interest in our plans

Because it’s fire fighting rather than winning the battle of ideas

Why we've positioned the 12 Principles as a framework for reconceiving health care's relationship with communities

A mess of a post reflecting where my head is right now - or at least how it’s not really anywhere concrete...

A number of people have signed up as supporters

Erin Hagan offers some straight-talking feedback on how our May 2017 symposium did not quite hit the mark and how we need to shift our approach

We promise our updates won’t always be obvious (!) but the main thing to tell you right now is that we’ve finally got the website up. We’ve had a single-page …

The Website is Up! Read More »

Catalina A. Denman, Elsa Cornejo and Rodrigo Cornejo describe how fostering agency has improved social participation and health, specifically in diabetes and through Wikipolítica

The serene pleasure of not having to explain yourself

On how things are going well and not going well, scribbled on the way back from a week in the US

And how The Financial Times and The Lancet make me do it all the time

Announcing a free webinar featuring an in-depth conversation about how lessons from the Bronx Healthy Buildings Program can be applied in other contexts

How it's so hard to question the narrative that conflates health care and health

Chris Aldridge, Peter Holtgrave and Andrea Grenadier explore how local public health can encourage people in communities to determine their own futures

My slow-and-fast decision to become carbon neutral and the odd feeling that it’s not as satisfying as I thought it would be

Dina Newman reflects on how organizing communities around a culture of health is years old, and how it’s not the same as being a ‘community health worker’

Shannon Simpson reflects on how the idea of healing needs to be deeply ingrained in the methods of participatory action research, if not all forms of research

The daily struggle of the entrepreneur

Rebecca Brothers asks what is behind health care’s reluctance to bring community to the table. Uncertainty? The loss power?

Announcing a free webinar in which Jefferson Healthcare, WA, share how they used our tool to take stock of how they're working with communities

A morning’s reading and three examples of the kind of lies we tell ourselves in health

Katherine Mella and Lawrence Barriner II of MIT CoLab share three reflections on BH&C’s symposium, each with a proposal for how to make improvements

Diane Wellman draws out the biggest themes from her 215 pages of notes on our symposium, Community Agency & Health

Elizabeth Slade reflects on how health care often focuses on the latest, shiniest technology, and doesn’t leave much space for the basic human needs of our stories being acknowledged

Through my flu-hazed brain I try to respond to the calls for more funding for the NHS in response to the annual, winter crisis

How my cousin and uncle help illustrate why health systems fail - with a bluntness typical of England’s East Midlands

How my instinctual reaction to a homeless person illustrated to me how inauthentic my behaviour has become

My favourite moment of 2017

Carl Baty, a presenter at our May 2017 symposium, shares why he got emotional during his talk and explores whether he was being exploited

Yet another thing I’m crap at and why it matters five years into doing the thing I’ve been doing

In GIH’s monthly bulletin, we make the case that it’s time for its members to place an explicit focus on agency, including examining their own governance structures and accountability frameworks

When I look at who’s voicing the same concerns as I would, I find myself stopping

Weaving together three recent experiences to urge more creativity in encouraging investment

Why they’re essential for moving from the what to the how. But, seriously, they’re so distracting...

Apparently it’s research but I’m self-conscious about that term and perhaps I shouldn’t be

Our plans to help build a learning environment, followed by an enabling environment, for practitioners in the UK exploring why the health care system fails to reach those most in need

I enjoyed it, even though the form didn’t really lend itself to get into the topics that I think matter

How the lack of preparation time is bad for everyone and makes me part of the problem

Board Member, Leigh Carroll, reflects on our May 2017 symposium and whether we understood who was doing the learning

Why I bristle at that term (and the need for more discipline around business model discovery)

Just some thoughts weaving together rights, responsibilities and agency, with an anecdote related to an illegal immigrant

Why well-presented arguments and citing of 'the evidence is getting in the way

First published on Collaborative Consulting, in this post Lori Peterson and Pritpal S Tamber discuss why - and how - health care can go further to better serve their communities

We want to coach local entities and learn what it really takes to make the shift

A strategic relationship to bring the importance of ‘community agency’ within reach of health systems embracing new approaches to health

How the idiocy of my thinking leads me to 'other' the people of the Deep South

We intend to grow the field of practice through learning, which is why we've recruited Maggie, the former Director of Strategy and Innovation of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers

Some musings spurred by a friend's death and me being on an island staring at the sea

I can't quite put my finger on it but there something - something! - that I struggle with in the country

In this post, Pritpal S Tamber shares our new tool to apply the 12 principles for fostering community agency to your community health work

In this post, Pritpal S Tamber, describes BH&C’s work in the UK and shares the ‘invitation’ that’s being used to engage fellow practitioners and funders

Some thoughts on doing keynotes at corporate retreats and whether they lead to any doing

In this post, Pritpal S Tamber, shares the gatherings to which Bridging Health & Community has been invited to share what it has learned

In this post, our CEO & Co-Founder, Pritpal S Tamber, reflects on the recent symposium and shares some early thinking on what we’ll do next

Why I feel "emotionally responsible" to the white working class

In this post, Annalisa Robles illustrates how policies can bias against rural communities and how the people of South Kern, CA, are organizing – often to achieve the basics

A post I've been holding myself back from writing but one that asks whether the attraction of my company is divisible from the racism that seems endemic in the country

In this post, Nicolle Bennett looks at the role of the arts in fostering individual and community agency, and explains her role as a documentarian at the 2017 symposium

In this post, Jeanne Ayers of the Minnesota Department of Health describes her journey from frustrated public health practitioner to establishing the Triple Aim of Health Equity

In this post, we announce the 40 people who’ll be sharing their experiences and perspectives through two case examples and six breakouts

In this post, Bridget B Kelly, Co-Founder of Bridging Health & Community, describes how we’ll be helping symposium participants connect with each other

A reflection on how the broken effort-to-value relationship is driving the sense of meaninglessness that many people are enduring

In this post, Alyssa Bryson and Katherine Mella of MIT CoLab describe how wellness-based development is a cornerstone of a just economy, and how it requires a ‘think, link and do’ approach

The difference between innovation and entrepreneurialism, and why the former needs more support than it gets

In this post, Maggie Tishman of the Bronx Healthy Buildings Program shares the sheer complexity of going ‘upstream’ as a taste of what we’ll hear at the May symposium

Six years after disc surgery it's time for knee surgery. I find the resolve to fight. This one last time. Somehow

In this post, Tiffany Donelson of the Connecticut Health Foundation talks about state-level innovation, health equity and why they’re sending a delegation to our May symposium

Bringing together what we have learned over the last four years into 12 principles that describes an inclusive, participatory and responsive process key to the future of health

How my current uncertainty is corrosive, especially when it comes to whether I'll play football again

In this post, Bridget Kelly, Co-Founder of Bridging Health & Community, describes the ‘setting the stage’ session at the forthcoming symposium, and how its themes will resonate through the two days

Are we too busy consuming information about the problems we're dealing with to do anything about them?

In this post, Leigh Carroll, a member of the Planning Committee of the forthcoming symposium, describes some of the relationship-building activities that we’ll be weaving into the agenda, and why

In this post, we hear from Michael B Roaldi of UnitedHealthcare Community and State on how they’re using Federal money for innovation to create new community collaborations

Why it matters, why it's hard and why it's an ask filled with inequity

In this post we hear from Tony Iton of The California Endowment, Bechara N Choucair of Kaiser Permanente, and Alonzo Plough of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

Announcing a US$300 ticket for community-based organizations, community residents & students, a US$500 ticket for government, nonprofit & universities, and options for supporters

How my confidence oscillated through our last Board meeting and what that does or doesn't mean for the work

Carl Baty, Executive Director of Rounding The Bases, describes how healing is about being able to express yourself, about people listening, and about acknowledging that what happened to you was not right

How in socially-mindful innovation you can spend too long being right to the detriment of ever achieving anything

S Leonard Syme, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology and Community Health at the Berkeley School of Public Health, describes how his profession has failed to apply what it has learned about social risk factors

Sometimes you read something that makes you realise just how little you understand aspects of modern life

In this post we hear from Mark L Wieland of Mayo Clinic and Rochester Healthy Community Partnership about how they use community-based participatory research to inform interventions, build community capacity, and create authentic relationships with community residents

A scramble of inter-related thoughts on why it's so hard to take a punt these days

In this post we interview Risa Wilkerson of Active Living By Design about how they inspire community-led change, the link to health equity, and what they’ll present at our May symposium

A scribble that, at the time, beautifully described how to change systems - and why classic approaches fail

How Dylan was the voice of his generation, how the Left have stopped listening, and how populist politicians will always win if we don't re-learn how to listen

How the launching of Bridging Health & Community has liberated this blog, and hence my voice, and how the change seems to be part of a wider trend in my life as I liberate myself from Facebook and question the value of Gmail

In this post, our CEO, Pritpal S Tamber, introduces our Chief Delivery Officer (and Co-Founder), Bridget B Kelly. The process was not without pain

Our new organization dedicated to strengthening the field of practice that connects the health sector to local communities (and how it relates to the Creating Health Collaborative)

Registration for the symposium is now open so it’s time to announce the speakers, case studies and breakouts

Penciled for May 15-16 in Oakland, CA, in this post I describe how the symposium’s Planning Committee has fashioned an agenda designed to create the conditions required for genuine collaboration

In spring 2017 we’ll be holding our first symposium. Through this post we’re reaching out to place-based funders to help local ‘delegations’ to participate

In this post, Pritpal S Tamber wraps up the twelve commentaries that were commissioned to comment on the Collaborative’s last report, 'Eleven Principles for Creating Health' (and apologises in advance for its length)

Geoffrey W. Wilkinson reminds us that much of it has been said – and done – before; just because the goals are yet to be won does not mean we can ignore the lessons of the past or get away with being less brave and less inclusive than others have been

An overview of the 18 presentations from the 24 participants of 'CHC 2016', this year's meeting of the Creating Health Collaborative, a growing community of innovators trying to understand – and create – health from the perspective of people and communities. The meeting was held July 28-29 in New York

John Craig describes how the Collaborative’s principles for creating health provoke him to demand a clearer critique of health care today, as well as an inclusive and inspiring vision of tomorrow

In this invited commentary Ian Burbidge argues that putting people at the heart of their health requires existing systems to change in ways they seem unprepared to do, despite their rhetoric

Announcing the participants of CHC 2016, the annual meeting of the Creating Health Collaborative, a larger gathering pencilled for October, and the desire to find like-minded funders

Nancy Adler and Erin Hagan share how their work with Evidence for Action is aligned with two of the Collaborative’s principles for creating health, measuring what matters and sharing power

Megan Sandel, Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, argues that it’s only through listening to community members can we begin to achieve health equity

David D Derauf argues that it is not the role of health professionals to reconceive health but to ask people and communities how we can rightfully participate in a process of resurfacing and clarifying what health is

Julian Corner reflects on how the Collaborative’s eleven principles for creating health suggest new ‘terms of exchange’ between service providers and service users that is at the heart of true co-production

Brian Castrucci and Lloyd Michener map the Collaborative’s eleven principles for creating health with a suite of free online resources to help you “just start”

Peter R. Doliber describes the Collaborative’s recent report as an important and vital platform for changing the delivery of healthcare but encourages it to seek the perspective of the individuals it purports to serve

Richard Smith reflects on the difficulty of defining ‘health’ and ’community’, two parts of the complex task of ‘returning health to the people’, while supporting the Collaborative’s efforts to learn by experimenting and reporting back

Alex Twigg of Ko Awatea, New Zealand, reflects on how, from a systems perspective, having a list of principles is key to change, and how that change might be expedited by a 'missing' twelfth principle, that of sense-making

Ollie Smith reflects on how just refining principles, as was done at the 2015 meeting of the Creating Health Collaborative, is not enough to catalyze practice

How Building Healthy Communities' recent animation goes beyond the usual rhetoric on 'social circumstances' to focus on 'opportunity' as key to health, and not just for the poor, but for all

Based on the experiences of entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs trying to approach health ‘beyond the lens of health care’, we present our new report with eleven principles for creating health and five key questions that need to be answered next

How a project in Brazil focusses on promoting self-sufficiency as a pathway to enable people to change their lives

Because there’s a disconnect between the health care system and the people it purports to serve

The Creating Health Collaborative now has an Executive, a subgroup of its members who have agreed to help me think through what we need to do, and to help me do it

An interview of Maggie Super Church about the Healthy Neighborhood Equity Fund

A reflection on the first UK-based meeting inspired by the Creating Health Collaborative

An interview of Hans Wijnands of The Rainbow Group in Amsterdam about its radical idea to help alcoholics by paying them with alcohol

An interview of Chantal Walg about how they're trying to operationalise the idea of 'positive health' across the Nijmegen Area of the Netherlands

An interview of Ollie Smith, Director of Strategy and Innovation at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity in London, about their hypothesis to improve health through increasing individual agency

Announcing the first edition of our book, Communities Creating Health, and a webinar with Stanford Social Innovation Review called Organizing Communities to Create Health

An interview of Amy Heydlauff of the Chelsea-Area Wellness Foundation on how they've devised and are implementing their strategy

An interview of Leigh Anne Cappello on how the Business Innovation Factory is trying to understand the social issues that affect child health and what can be done about them

We'll turn the series into an eBook while beginning work on the next meeting of the Creating Health Collaborative

Five principles to guide how communities can develop new pathways to health, plus concrete steps toward contributing to a culture that values connections and relationships as much as treatments and health campaigns

Only by finding a new narrative that embraces the whole, rather than the parts, can we build the health-creating systems we need

How funders can best support place-based initiatives

Imagining a healthier future doesn’t start with how to pay for it. Communities must first develop a shared view of what a healthier life could be

The case for investing in the long-term health and well-being of communities, based on what those communities value

Some thoughts from an evening's discussion amongst a small group in the Netherlands trying to rethink health

Including community members in decisions about evaluation can improve the community’s capacity to effectively manage and control change

Four ways to improve community evaluation so that it helps build, rather than erode, social progress

Three principles for solving complex, systemic problems like improving community health

Solutions to social problems are often hidden in the most obvious places, masquerading as problems

Four practices that can help people establish common intent; sense emerging needs and solutions; and collectively prototype, create, and evolve innovative health models and relationships

How a “lean startup” approach can help create an effective community-based program

Eight tools for building inclusive, community programs to address health and other social issues

Blending practices and theory to improve health outcomes outside the clinical setting

Strategies for engaging communities of color in local health initiatives

A “whole health” approach to improving access to food and food education

When people have a real voice in the decisions affecting their lives and health, they thrive in ways beyond measure

Our understanding of community can help funders and evaluators identify, understand, and strengthen the communities they work with

The role of community in well-being has always been a part of life, but the health sector’s efforts to support that role needs work

It’s time we looked beyond health care for insights on how to build community-based, health-creating systems

We'll explore what it means to work 'with' communities as opposed to just 'on' them

An interview of David Citrin of Possible on how they're trying to create an approach to health in Nepal that doesn't just replicate the unsustainable systems in high-income countries

Introducing a tool that may help you think differently by encouraging you to read things that probably wouldn't have

An interview of Andres Marquez-Lara on how he's using performance techniques to bring communities together

An interview of Dr Jonathan Stead of C2 Connecting Communities on how their work is based on the ethos that residents can be part of the solution

Why wanting local interventions to scale is naïve

A report from the first meeting of the Creating Health Collaborative, including the principles that seemed to resonate across people's work

How independent campaigns like Movember have more potential to shift how we approach health than the health care system does

Why I am focussing more on the future of health than on my initial focus as a consultant, which was to optimise clinical knowledge

Why I decided to stop using the term 'Wellthcare' and what I am doing next

Why I have got involved with an IOM-hosted meeting on designing evaluations for what communities really want

And we decided to call ourselves the 'Creating Health Incubation Group'

By accepting that health is socially constructed we need to understand that creating will always be local and fraught

Reflecting on talks by Pippa Malmgren, an economist, and Des Gorman, the Executive Chair of Health Workforce New Zealand

Re-publishing Jamie Harvie's excellent foreword to the Democracy Collaborative's report, Hospitals Building Healthier Communities

Reflecting on the work of Dr Lim Boon Keng of the late 1800s in Singapore to improve people's health by improving their social conditions - and what it tells us for today

A mea culpa

An overview of the extraordinary work of Alex Briscoe, Director of Alameda County’s Health Care Services Agency

A re-posting of Charles Leadbeater's chapter in The Alpine Review that tomorrow's health systems require us to learn from the developing world

To bring together the ideas that we've discussed in Wellthcare into a brief, accessible format

How number-crunching at a population level cannot create an understanding of people's lives, and how Wellthcare is fundamentally different

To understand health in ways other than the deficit model, to find real-world examples of health creation, and to hear the perspective of funders in this space

An attempt to understand what 'health creation' is and how it might come about

An interview of Victor Wang, CEO of GeriJoy, the app that seeks to leverage the global supply of compassion

Some thoughts (and scribbles) on the health debate in 2013

A report on the recent discussion amongst the Wellthcare Explorers on the importance of context and assets

A look at some of the health projects I came across in the US that consider the importance of community

An interview of Joe Dickinson of Jersey Post, the postal system that checks in on its elderly community as part of its rounds

I’m writing this Log post from Las Vegas, USA, where I have come to experience the Downtown Project, an attempt to transform the downtown area into the most community-focused large …

“Health and social care: lots of activity, little value” Read More »

Consumerism and empowerment were the terms they used

A friend of mine sent me an email with the above subject line and the following poem

A report on the Wellthcare Explorers' second debate, this time about the idea of the 'wantified self'

And how I have been told that Europe is not the place for big ideas

Why I walked away from the quantified self movement because it afforded little space for me to express what mattered to me

A report on the first discussion between the Wellthcare Explorers

If so it becomes more likely that we'll work with broader understandings of health and potentially unlock our thinking

A quick post that I'm going to spend more time writing about Wellth than what it takes to optimise clinical knowledge

How a group of strangers started to take care of each other

There is value in community that keeps us healthy; it's time to explore how to nurture it

Exploring the disconnect between digital health and academic medicine

Why I see a 'web of trust' in what makes health care work, and how that trust needs to move beyond clinicians and include citizens

A brief look at some of the themes we considered for the 2013 stage programme

Why the only 'next big thing' is what it has always been - perseverance and adaptability

Is it about the delivery of clinical services or the collective ego of a place?

Through real world, real-time feedback on the realities of being sick and consuming care

Business ideas are all very well but we first need to understand the messy world of being sick

Because it means we pursue an idea without understanding what's really needed

Some reflections on the speakers at the Cambridge Health Network's Christmas event

Health care has prioritised self-interest and secrecy for too long

Some inspiring rhetoric from the recently appointed National Director for Patients and Information

Because it's high time we had some new thinking and ideas on the future of health

By not working harder to have all sectors of the community represented and by not creating a level, information-based playing field

How increasingly complicated knowledge requires us to have better coordination between different types of clinicians - and the role of trust within that

Because it's a glimpse into a choice-based future of health care

A reflection on the potential of an informal but informed group

How the self-appointed elite of health care failed to understand the importance of conflicts of interest

A photo that says it all about the amount of talk in health care

Why information is not enough to change practice - change also needs to be proactively 'enabled'

My reflections on a Roundtable meeting hosted by the Institute of Medicine on using knowledge to influence practice

My understanding of trust and knowledge and what it means for using information to change practice

How some people use confusion as a cover for the fact that they don't know what they're talking about

How the randomised controlled trial is preventing us from establishing knowledge fit for the real world

An exploration of how we apply knowledge to IT systems in a way that makes it possible to update it as new evidence emerges

Why my first consultancy practice was called optimising clinical knowledge